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Word Doc now has little squares :(


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#1
Grizzilla

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My father has been working on a family history document over the past year or so and has been periodically backing up the document. He last backed up the file 2 days ago. When he opened it to work on it today, lots of his work had been replaced with little squares. Both the copy on his hard drive and the backup on disk have these squares. (for example ⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪)
He sent me a copy of the document in email to see if I could do anything with it. My first thought was that it was an issue with the wrong font, but this was not the case. I have a feeling that I cannot do anything with the copy he sent me since that doc doesn’t appear to be corrupt at all.
I have a feeling that anything I try may need to be done on his machine. Is there a hidden folder anywhere that might have a more recent copy of that documents that we can try to recover? There are 2 reasons that make me think that is the case. 1) It seems that when I backup my documents by copying the My Document folder to a network drive at work I see file names that I know I have not worked on in years and that I have deleted long ago, and 2) sometimes when I go to save a file in Office it gives me a strange folder name full of documents that look familiar but I haven’t used in a while. Of course I cannot find any location on my machine right now
He is using Win XP pro and Office 2003 pro one a 1 year old Dell Dimension. Since he backed up the file he has not run a chkdsk, defrag, disk clean up, but he did clear the temp Internet files from IE (Tools/Internet Options/Delete Files). He also ran his McAfee Virus Scan and it did not find anything (he tried to update it first but there was no new updates since last he had done so.

Any thoughts on possibility of recovering this data? Let me know if there is any more info I need to provide.

PS - I have also suggested to him that moving forward he “Save As” and use a date or version number.
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#2
admin

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It sounds as if the document displayed correctly on your computer. Were the squares also present when you opened the document on your machine?

Word does save temp files that we can try to recover, but it sounds like registry corruption to me. Have him insert his Office 2003 CD, and choose repair from the installation menu. There's also a couple of updates available at Office Update, make sure they're installed.
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#3
Grizzilla

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It also did not show up correctly for me. I also see the boxes, that is why I figure that it will need to be some work done at his machine and hope that a temp file is living somewhere

I will Run through the repair with his Office CD, and hit Office Update. I know his Windows Update is current.

Thanks,
B
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