I feel like a complete idiot, but I was trying to copy and paste about fifteen paragraphs of text from a Microsoft Word document to an email message, and somehow ended up cutting the text out of the document and then having my email program crash. The net result is that I’ve lost about a day’s typing and really want to know if there’s any way I can recover it? You might not realize it, but Microsoft Word actually keeps somewhat of a history of your document in the file, even when it looks like there’s nothing there and even when you have revision tracking turned off. One way you can see that this is the case is by doing a “Save As” on a document you’ve been editing for a while. You’ll find that the new version of the file, the version that has all the archival data purged, is often dramatically smaller than the original.
Now, the challenge is how to access that data. What you need to do is enable document conversion on open. In Microsoft Office XP, that’s done by creating a blank document (so you can get to the Options preference, otherwise it’s grayed out), then selecting Tools – Options and clicking on the General tab. You’ll see this: Select the Confirm conversion at Open option (it’s right by the mouse cursor) and click “OK”.
Now open up the file with the missing text and you’ll be asked if you want to use a converter: There are lots of choices, but I’ve highlighted the one you want: Recover Text from Any File. Click “OK” and you’ll see lots of junk, typographical notations, and other miscellany. In the middle of it, however, you should be able to find all your missing text. When I deleted some text from my test file and did this procedure, here’s what I saw: The text from “Dave Taylor says:” to the bottom of the page was all deleted from the file, then the file was saved to disk. Theoretically it should have vanished, but it’s still there and I was able to recover it. Hopefully this will get you back your missing prose!
Dec 5, 2018 - We show you how to edit a PDF on a Mac, plus some alternatives that let you finesse the finished product a bit. When you click on the text tool a box will appear with the word Text inside. The text might be red by default - to change the appearance, select. Click this then find the words you want to save. Not only can you find all instances of a word, letter or phrase in a document and replace them, you can find text by its font or style. Using wildcards, Find and Replace can make it easy to look for misspelled words or variations of similar words.
I just read the questions from you fans and one of them submitted the following: “thanks alot 4 this lesson, but i have a problem that when i open up the file with the missing text and there wasn’t any box to ask me if i want to use a converter like the picture u show us! How can i make it appear?
And i did as u said: Select the Confirm conversion at Open option (it’s right by the mouse cursor) and click “OK”. HELP ME PLZZZZZZZZZ I NEED MY WORD FILE BACK Posted by: nourah at May 10, 2007 4:35 AM ” I have the same problem that the “Convert file” box does not appear for me. I would like to see the solution but I can’t find where you replied to the above. Can you tell me the solution or where to find the answer to Nourah’s question? I think your website is great. Thanks a lot! I love your site, it has saved me so many times.
This is something I just don’t get. I am using Mac OS X 10.5.8 and Word 2004 version 11.5.5 (I thought I had 2003, I’m peeved now) and today I was revising a text that I translated from a large.pdf file (a downloaded Google book) in a Word document. I had them both open along with Safari with several windows open.
I saved a lot, really every few minutes. I had added comments to the margins, just page numbers referring to the original. I was on page 9 or so out of a 17-page Word doc. Suddenly when I tried to highlight and italicize a word (which I had been doing all along), the Word doc just hung. I tried everything I could think of. The first couple of times, I got the original document back and it seemed to work fine until I tried to italicize again. Then it hung again.
However, something much worse has happened now. My saved version labeled 18:44 (time) with the corrections and comments, has vanished! It’s not in Finder as it was the first couple of times I tried after the hang. It’s just completely gone as far as I can see, and all I can find is my original version without corrections or comments.
An entire day’s work down the drain even though I saved it regularly. Can you help? This advice, along with a little detective work, saved my life. I was writing for about an hour and a half, and something went wrong when I tried to save. I kept getting an error message. I closed the file, thinking I would be promted to save, but it just closed without prompting or saving. There was an auto recovered copy saved as a.tmp file in my Word folder (c://Documents and Settings/Matt/Application Data/Microsoft/Word), but that was last saved at 12:10 PM.
I was writing until 1:33 PM, so lost a lot of data since. I then did a search for.tmp files on my computer. I found that there was a.tmp file saved last saved at 1:33 PM in my Windows temp folder(c://Documents and Settings/Matt/Local Settings/Temp). When you open up a.tmp file, a “Convert File” dialogue box will appear, and you will be prompted to confirm the conversion at open (as long as you checked the box to confirm conversion at open as described in the first step. Be sure to select “Recover Text from Any File.” The other ones either didn’t work for me, or came out too messed up to make sense of. When I opened this.tmp file, there were 2026 pages of information from writings that dated back over a year.
I did a search for a phrase I remembered typing, and found all the information I needed on page 470. Out of the 2026 pages there was about 20 pages that I needed. Everything is in order, BUT there was a lot of repeated sentences, and there was stuff from other writings in between a lot of the text. So it’s going to take some time removing the extra stuff from 20 pages, but at least it’s all there!
Good luck finding your stuff! I just wanted to thank you for this article. I was just making last minute corrections to my course syllabus for my class that begins tomorrow morning when the document (or, more likely, my overloaded hard drive) somehow made my entire course calender evaporate. I followed these steps and was able to recover hours upon hours worth of data. Thank you SO MUCH.
I really appreciate that you posted this. The “covert file” didn’t appear when I opened my document, so I went to: “File” “Open” (in the lower scroll down bar, select): “Recover Text From Any File” (select document to open). Stephen, I fear for the worst.
Try this: copy the file, then change its name to.txt or.rtf, then open it and see if in the mess of formatting information (the first half dozen pages, for sure, possibly longer) you can find the actual.text. that you seek to recover.
It’s not great, but it’s better than a complete loss? There are also commercial “recovery” apps too, if you want to poke about on Google for a bit If you can send the file to me, btw, and don’t mind me writing about it, perhaps I can try to recover the text and create an adjunct to this page? You can use my Gmail.com address: “d1taylor”. I have been using the drawing tool of MS Word 2003 to draw a map/outline of each chapter of my book, one page per chapter/outline. I’ve been going page by page developing this outline for a few weeks.
Yesterday, I went to scroll through the outline and to my horror, 24 chapters/outlines were missing from the middle of the file. I haven’t any idea where they went nor how they got sent there. I tried your suggestion of open new file/Tools/Options/General-Confirm/open file in question. When I take the final step – open the file from which the stuff is missing, I don’t get the ‘convert file’ choices that is supposed to come up. Sure hope you can help me recover this lost chunk of my file.
It’s a week’s work I’ve lost. Thanks in advance for your help. Hi all, I tried the above trick, and it still does not work. I got this far with the help menu of the new, complicated Word I got this far: When u click on open, in the ‘files of type’ u should see ‘Recover text from any file’. If it is not the case, the converter is not installed.
Maybe in older versions this is why no dialog box pops up when opening the doc. So u just follow the instructions in Help, install the converter via your control panel, add or remove programs function (in the start menu.) unfortunately it does not work, I even made a trial file, with no success:( Also it is my Mum who messed up the file, she is on the other side of the ocean. She sent the file to me I wonder if I have to do this trick on the same computer?
(sorry, I am a prehistoric IT user). I read with interest your article #5995 – Can I recover lost text from a Microsoft Word document? It doesn’t work for me at all, when I follow your instructions and open a file the option to ‘convert file’ does not appear, just the document as it was when I last saved it. Maybe I didn’t make any mistakes for it to convert However that’s by the.
I’m prompted to suggest, in case you havn’t already, that although it’s too late after the event any futurre problems of the type you were addressing would be solved more simply by using ‘Clipmate’ from Thornsoft.com It keeps a copy of everything you cut or copy to the clipboard and makes it available in a simple for repasting at any future time (depending on the parameters the user sets for how long /how much stuff is saved). I also use it as a database for addresses and all manner of other info I harvest from the web or wherever. (there is the facility to ‘file’ clips into any number of folders, which can be set to save indefinitely). There are lots of other amazing neat things it can to – thornsoft.com has a good guide – but the relevant killer is that you can even use it as a simple word processor to create and edit text files which are automatically written to disk as you go, so even a computer crash mid-sentence will not result in ANY loss of typed data.
You just re-boot, open clipmate and there in it’s latest entry is all the stuff you wrote. Just a thought that you might like to explore the benefits of Clipmate. If you do and like it think of this as my cappuchino to you.