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Microsoft Word Document is opening as SQUARES ?
I have quite a few archived MS Word files covering several years and I can no longer open them, they just appear as all Squares when opened. I've been looking around in internet for answer. Opening these files in Wordpad it's the same, there is of course nothing in notepad as this is a text editor.. Opening file with Word 97 it's the same. I did not save these files to flash drive before hard disk, as some suggest is the problem. What I can think is different is they were created in windows 95 operating system before windows XP was installed. So I guess it might be a font problem. I did not use Strange fonts, usually the default times roman or ariel is what i use. So how to find out which font is needed to be around, so i can reload it and resave it to correct it? Or is it corrupt beyond recovery? I use MS word 2000 on windows xp. Thanks in advance for help with this.
I meant to say from Windows 98 to Windows XP -- sorry. I opened the doc and see the font is Courier New, which is present in Windows XP. Changing the font while opened in word 2000, had no effect. I have tried already word 97, but maybe i need another copy of it, or to do it another way.
I found the MS word 97/2000 viewer and downloaded it and tried it -- same thing -- all squares. Looking around at older files on my pc, many older .doc files open just fine. I guess it's corrupt. Every character is a square there are no other characters. Still would be nice to recover the file if possible.
3 Answers
- ?Lv 41 decade agoFavorite Answer
Word squares -- when your document lacks characters
Comments (1)
I have just tried to reopen some Word 97 files not used since a change of computer from Windows 98 to XP. I get a page of open squares with occasional letters shown. Eric Liggett
When Word opens a document, it uses the type font specified or, if you don't have it, the closest it can find. Each character is represented by a number, which Word looks up in a codepage table. When it can't find a character, it replaces it with a small blank square.
This problem is particularly common when opening Chinese and Cyrillic documents. In this case, it suggests that either there was a problem with your original font - for example, you used a custom or non-standard font - or you now have a fault in XP. If not, the documents are probably corrupt. Try opening them on someone else's PC. If that works, you can re-save them as .txt and .rtf files.
I have oversimplified things here. Word 97 was the first version of Word to use Unicode to encode rich text in 16-bit characters, like Windows NT/2000/XP, but Windows 98 still used 8-bit ASCII (or ANSI) characters. For technical details, see Peter Constable's paper, Unicode Issues in Word 97 and Word 2000. (You can download the 532K PDF white paper directly here.)
Backchat: Barry Moore says to try loading the files in Microsoft's free Word 97 file viewer, then copying the whole text and pasting it into another word processor. "It works for me, anyway!"
- 1 decade ago
sounds a lot like a font problem.
Sometimes I can highlight and change the font to something else and it works. Otherwise you need to find out which font you used
- 5 years ago
Ehhhh... try selecting it all and changing the font? Otherwise go back to school, open it there, and save in a different format.
