# My work in word has turned to Squares



## steve-d (Feb 10, 2008)

I have been completing an essay for uni in Microsoft Word and then suddenly an error message appeared the document automatically saved and when I re-opened it the file was a mixture of some of my text and lots of small squares.
when I highlight it all and try and change the text to a different font this doesn't seem to correct it and also it is still showing as a .doc file.

Has anyone had a similar issue and corrected it.  I highlighted all the text and squares and the word count is still correct.  How can I turn these squares back into characters?



Steve


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## Richard Schollar (Feb 10, 2008)

Hi Steve

I don't use Word much but from your description I think it sounds very much like you have lost a proportion of your original text - the little boxes (I suspect) represent ascii characters 1-31 (normal alpha text (excluding gramma) is composed of characters 65-90 and 97-122).  Now, either you have retained all your original text plus Word is converting your line feeds and carriage returns and tabs to the little boxes you see (this is good, as you can strip out the boxes and have your original text) or some corruption has occurred and you have actually lost text characters which have been misinterpreted as these dodgy box characters (this is worse).  If you remove the box characters, are you left with your original text?


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## steve-d (Feb 10, 2008)

Thanks for your reply, I have a little extract that shows the problem below.  How can I find out if it is a corruption or just misplaced words?

disulphide bridges (Proudlove, K. 2001). Oxygen is important in helping towards strengthening the gluten network however to⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪⨪ the results could be gathered from further parts in the experiment. Part two of the experiment was a


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## Richard Schollar (Feb 10, 2008)

I take it this isn't Word2007 (yep 'cos it's a .doc not a .docx file).  You can't even open it up in a text editor then (.doc is a binary file).  I don't think it looks good I'm afraid - have you got an older version of the file you can restore to?  You could always try  doing a find/replace (replacing the odd little squares with nothing) to remove them, but it looks to me like you have lost some data.  I'm not sure there is a way of recovering it (could well be wrong here, however).


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