Word – Content suddenly converted to strange letters after save

file-corruptionmicrosoft word

I was working in a .docx Microsoft Word document, and when I hit save to save the document, all the characters were transformed to unknown characters, well unknown characters to me at least, because they seem to appear as Asian letters. Here is a portion of the transformed document:

ࠀ ࠚ ࠛ ࠜ ࠼ ࠽ ࡦ ࢄ ࢢ ࣫ ँ ः त ृ क़ ख़ ग़ 뗇뗇醣楿坿㍅㍅ 
ᘢ⸲䌀ᡊ伀͊儀͊帀͊愀ᡊ洀᱈猄᱈ ᘢ镤䌀ᡊ伀͊儀͊帀͊愀ᡊ洀᱈猄᱈ ᘢ鱨䥓䌀ᡊ伀͊儀͊帀͊愀ᡊ洀᱈猄

What I tried so far is:

  1. Passed some of this text to Google Translate. Google was able to detect several languages in the text such as Hindi and Chinese.

  2. Saved the .docx as a plain text file. There were several encoding options to choose from. I tried them all from the following dialog box, but no solution:

    enter image description here

The .docx seems to have a normal size of 85 kb for the amount of content it had, so I don't think there was any content that has been lost. More details: I was running low in local disc space.

  • Operating System: Windows XP
  • Microsoft Word version: 2007

So the questions are: what has happened in the background that caused the normal text to convert to such symbols and how do to retrieve the content it? I feel the .docx document has been converted to some other kind of file format, and now Word is unable to read it.

I am attaching the document to this link if that helps: https://www.dropbox.com/s/858v143ebqgdeij/AL-P0122074.docx?dl=0‏

Best Answer

Based on the info provided I'd say the document got corrupted, not converted to some other language or alike.

Corruption could be due to your mentioned lack of disk space, or a corrupted file system, or a bad drive, or flakey RAM, a bad network connection during save, etc., etc.

If it's truly corrupted, then you need to restore from backup.

Since a DOCX is just a zip file, try opening it with 7-Zip (or alike) and see if you can pull any info from it. If not, then it's gone for good.

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