Re. recovering from fast saves

[Geoff Hart <geoff-h -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA>]

     Since several posters have reported problems involving Word's "fast
     save" option, here's a "save the day" recovery tip if the file appears
     corrupted and won't open in Word. (I haven't tried this with Word
     itself, but it's worked with other word processors on other
     platforms.)

     Open the file in any ASCII editor, and copy the text to your word
     processor via the clipboard (or save it again as ASCII and then open
     it in the word processor). Good editing software will open damn near
     any file format, and even though you'll get what looks like
     gobbledygook, most of the text will still be there, intact, buried in
     the midst of the formatting codes. Use a simple search and replace for
     each piece of gibberish in the file. (For example, one old wordpro I
     used set all its format codes as &....&, and I cleaned up the file by
     replacing all words of the format "space & wildcard & space" with a
     single space. Your file codes will vary...) You'll have to reformat
     the file, particularly if you used style sheets, but you'll get back
     most of your text, which is the important part anyway.

     If the file is really righteously trashed, so it won't open in any
     software, disk editors (I use Norton Utilities) will let you copy the
     file's sectors directly to a clean, safe text file. (Instructions
     appear in each utility's manual, so I won't go into details. They vary
     too much.)

     Of course, all this involves a bit of effort. Much easier to start
     again from your backup copy of the file. You do keep backups, don't
     you?

     --Geoff Hart     #8^{)}
     geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca

     Disclaimer: These comments are my own and don't represent the opinions
     of the Forest Engineering Research Institute of Canada.