Hi all,

I am currently in the final stages of writing my dissertation for my final year project at university and I have many, many plots from MATLAB pasted into the Word document as figures.

I had all sorts of issues with matlab exporting so I resorted to just copying and pasting the figures into word directly (meaning I don't have them saved anywhere other than the document)

The image was there perfectly fine a couple of hours ago but now it all I see is a white box with the box around it where the figure should be.

THINGS I HAVE TRIED THAT HAVEN'T WORKED

I tried to find older auto-saved versions of the document but unfortunately the furthest back one was an hour ago and it had the same problem.

I have made sure picture placeholders is turned off.


If anyone can help me with this I will be eternally grateful!

Thanks

Can you attach a document (not just a screenshot) to a post with some representative data (delete anything sensitive)? You do this via the paperclip symbol on the 'Go Advanced' tab at the bottom of this screen.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

I attatched one of the pages.

There should be two figures and you can see the plain white boxes.

I think it might have to do with the fact that these were quite demanding figures copied straight from MATLAB. When I copied it said there was a large amount in the clipboard.

Not sure though, help still appreciated.

Attached Files

Sample.docx (16.5 KB, 9 views)

It would appear the two original images have been lost from your attachment and have been replaced by a single blank square. That said, you may nevertheless be able to recover some of the original images for your document. What you can do is change the file's extension from docx to zip, then open the zip archive (which is all docx files are). Any images will be stored in the zip archive's Word/Media folder. You should be able to see fairly quickly which ones have any meaningful content. Extract those, then reinsert them into the document. Otherwise, you will need to find a backup of the document that does contain the images and copy them from there into the current version.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

How do I do that?

Ok, I did what you said. A bunch of the images say 'It appears that the file was moved or renamed'

Looks like I'm screwed then.

Why on Earth did this happen in the first place? Word makes no sense to me sometimes

Document corruption can be caused by many different factors. Unsafe removal of a USB drive is a common cause. If that's what happened here, you were very lucky to have retained any meaningful content.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

No USB shenanigans occured here.
I have only ever opened and edited this one document.

Nevertheless, I appreciate your attempts to help me.