What happened to this data?

May 12, 2009 11:26 AM

A professor royally screwed up a MS Word 2003 DOC file. Is there any hope?

I work in IT. A professor here just came to me with an emergency. He was working on a massive Word document (in Office 03 - no backups, of course!). According to his rather vague description, "What I was doing: renumbering equation fields via CTRL A F9"

The end result is that the document is, more or less, completely blank. I can't really make sense of how those key strokes could remove everything. I know CTRL + A selects all, but F9 seems to not do anything. Also, obviously he did the worst possible thing by saving the document and then apparently closing down Word.

Here's where things get weird - although the file is empty, it's still about 1.1MB in size, which suggests *something* is there. Also, if you inspect the document properties in Windows, you see that there are ~ 44,000 characters and ~7,000 words. When you open the document (I've tried Word 08 for Mac and Word 07 for Windows) it momentarily lists the "correct" number of characters at the bottom of the page. Then it thinks for a moment and the character count reverts to 0.

I'm trying to figure out what he did by pouring over Word 03 shortcut manuals, and also trying to figure out if the data is recoverable. Any clues, hivemind?

posted by kbanas to computers & internet (14 comments total)

Can you save as HTML then view source? Sometimes you can see old stuff...
posted by A Terrible Llama at 11:30 AM on May 12

Also, I just found out that if you do a "Quick Look" in OS X, the entire document seems to appear intact - graphs and all.
posted by kbanas at 11:31 AM on May 12

Also, I don't think he could have gotten that deep in without an auto-save? Maybe see if he's got a .tmp file floating around.
posted by A Terrible Llama at 11:31 AM on May 12

Try opening it with Notepad? (You'd lose any formatting, but at least the content would be there.)
posted by LolaGeek at 11:36 AM on May 12 [2 favorites]

I bet you checked this already, but I had a co-worker once who somehow changed their text color for the entire document to white, thus making it look like a blank document. Might be something to check....
posted by anastasiav at 11:37 AM on May 12

Make a copy then save as RTF or text from within Word.
posted by wongcorgi at 11:40 AM on May 12

So, I've gotten to the point with your suggestions that I can get the text out of the thing - sans all formatting - by using a a combination of recovery tools / opening it in Notepad / random futzing - and as I said Quick Look in OS X shows EVERYTHING - equations and graphs and text in tact... so it's close.

Hrm.
posted by kbanas at 11:45 AM on May 12

Huh.

ALT + F9 apparently fixed it.

I have no idea why or how.
posted by kbanas at 11:49 AM on May 12

Have you tried File: Print: Save as pdf from Quick Look? That at least would give you a hard copy with the formatting.

I can't imagine what your prof did; Command A selects all, Ctrl A does nothing. I've tried all kinds of key slips and nothing remotely reproduces the problem. I'm not working with the original document of course. Good luck.
posted by firstdrop at 11:55 AM on May 12

Thats because your professor did not type CTRL A F9, He typed Ctrl A, then ALT F9 - which atleast in word deselects field codes , gives you one blank sheet but does not delete all data.

ALT F9 just undo(es) that and everything is back where it was.
posted by cusecase at 11:59 AM on May 12

The file size suggest Track Changes might be on. Check out Track Changes (not sure which menu in 2003 but probably Tools). Turn it on and have a look at accept/reject.
posted by Billegible at 2:35 PM on May 12

I've always had nightmares about hitting control-A, then space or backspace. (A sort of GUI version of the unix rm -rf /)

glad to hear you got it back. i'm curious about cusecase's answer. What the heck are "field codes"?
posted by kamelhoecker at 7:55 PM on May 12

field codes are place holders for data that can change, or will be inserted later. Page numbers, current date, mail-merge, table of contents, that sort of thing.
posted by ArkhanJG at 10:31 PM on May 12

F9 is sorta near the backspace key... maybe he hit that instead?
posted by jrishel at 10:23 AM on May 14