Hey everyone. Ive been having a real hard time trying to figure out what went wrong with this document. I moved a few files for my buddy and promised him everything would be just as it was, but something happen and his 2003 word document now has a bunch of weird symbols when he opens it with word 2007. Ive read a few things on opening it with notepad and all that but nothing is working and im really scared cause this doc means alot to him. Ive even tried the 2003 word viewer application and even that opens it with those weird sympols. There are two types of the file, a 97-2003 file type and also one thats a TEXT RICH FORMAT. Can someone please help me out and get his text back to original form. Thank you very much.

What did you do with this file exactly? Just moved it within the same computer? Maybe some fonts are missing.

I moved it to an external harddrive because i was formatting there computer and then i accidentally deleted the file and then recovered it, and after i recovered it, the situation happened.

I don't think the delete/recover could damage the file, maybe the original computer had something this file relied on, such as fonts, so it doesn't display correctly on another computer.

I see, but I did put it on back after I formatted and she got the same problem, but the computer was formatted so anything that the old computer had with the document is gone anyway by now. Do u think there are some sort of convertion programs or something to convert the symbols or??

Make a backup before you do anything about the file. Conversion won't help, I would try to open it with other computers, or examine the content of the file. If the file is not sensitive, you can upload it.

Thanks alot. I'll try it on other computers. Thank you for your help.