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Sean Hower reports: <<I was working on a doc, and click the close button.
Because I hadn't saved it, I got the typical "Do you want to save your
changes" prompt. I clicked yes. I came back to the doc a few minutes later
and opened it. It now looks like a plain text file. All of the styles are
gone, the tables are gone. The graphics are gone. It's looks like a happy
little text file with a DOC file extension.>>
This can easily happen if you're working from the keyboard (rather than,
say, clicking with the mouse to select directories etc.). An overzealous use
of the tab key or careless click of the mouse can move the cursor into the
"document format" field and the next keystroke will select one of the many
formats listed there. If you'd inadvertently saved the document as text,
then typed the file name as "Name.doc", that would explain what happened.
Doesn't sound like what you described, so I'm just guessing.
<<This thing is 40 pages long. I don't want to have to reformat and place
everything back into their tables. Does anyone know how I can avoid this?>>
For one, try looking in the autorecover data to see if Word saved a
temporary file containing your work before the format change. Look in
Tools/Options/File locations to see where your autorecover information is
stored; if no directory is listed, try either c/temp or c/windows/temp. If
you can't find any of these files, your formatting is almost certainly
hosed.
On the plus side, Word will do one nice thing after wrecking all your hard
work. Putting everything back into tables isn't hard; simply select all the
text for a given table, open the Table menu, and select "Convert text to
table". So long as the tab stops all line up, you'll rebuild the table
quickly. If they don't line up, spend a few moments aligning them before
trying this menu combination.
Best of luck!
--Geoff Hart, geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
Forest Engineering Research Institute of Canada
580 boul. St-Jean
Pointe-Claire, Que., H9R 3J9 Canada
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