Can I recover lost text from a Microsoft Word document?

When I write proposals, it's pretty often that MS Word will catch me in this kind of mistake. I'm glad to see this suggestion and will be pointing people here from my blog.

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 by..

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.

hi there ..
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 ..
:"(

My parents just got a new computer and somehow when my mom (bless her poor non-techie heart) was working in Word she managed to make the entire Edit menu disappear. Any advice on how to get it back would be much appreciated!

To make it work, you need to save your damaged file as a different format like Word 97 RTF, then open it again and save it back to normal doc.

I was deleting some unused programs and deleted Windows 2000, I didn't think I needed it, had not been used since 2003, I have been using Windows XP, and now Excel and Word are gone, what do I do?

Hi Dave - Yesterday my husband somehow accidently deleted all the text in a file and saved the file before closing it. Today when I opened the file (the name remained the same) it is empty! I followed your directions for recovering lost text, and I got the typographical notations on the screen but the lost text (the file had been over 100 pages) was not there. Is there a way to restore the file before it was modified yesterday? Thanks for your expertise and help. Beth

hi there interesting read, but can this also be done on micosoft office word documents 2003 - 2007 vista home and student i lost much work and i am having problems locating this work. look foreward to hearing from u thanx - yogi

Hi, I have the same problem, but it happened on a mac. Could i do this on a mac? thanks :)

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 recovered my word,excel file but, the file not shown that's actual font that's shows different language ? please hlp me>>>>>>>

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.

this doesnt work!!

Hi Dave - Yesterday my husband somehow accidently deleted all the text in a file and saved the file before closing it. Today when I opened the file (the name remained the same) it is empty! I followed your directions for recovering lost text, and I got the typographical notations on the screen but the lost text (the file had been over 100 pages) was not there. Is there a way to restore the file before it was modified yesterday? Thanks for your expertise and help. Beth

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".

Is it necessary to check ALWAYS CREATE BACKUP COPY in "Save" under Option?
I followed all steps, I checked Convert option, then clicked on File, but did not q window with offer to convertion, nor I did it with Open and repair. I even made a est on some other file, that I erased, and tried to recover the way you described.

Dont work!

DAVE i was writin a huge facebook message but then this laptops keypad... it jus!
took me to another page

any way i can recover what i had been writing?

Please help me i forgot my word ( Ms Word 2003) password how i have to open again please help me.

I selected confirm conversion at open and also changed the file to a txt but the "convert file" box did not appear when I opened the document. Any suggestions?

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)

okay, listen, I had the same problem--accidentally deleted a bunch of stuff and then saved it as the version that had a lot of things deleted. what worked for me was opening the file with txt edit--for some reason, it went back to the earlier version.

good luck

(i have microsoft word on a mac, btw)

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 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.

Any ideas? Can you help?

I tried a zillion things and finally, one of them worked! I got it back. Thanks so much for the File > open > recover tip, it saved me.

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!

Don Lytle

If anyone is having trouble with this in the newest version of Word, you have to go to "open" and scroll down in one of the drop down bars to "show previous versions".

Warnin: contains malware and spyware.

HOW DOES THIS WORK
PL HELP ME HOW DO YOU GET TO DOCUMENT CONVERSION