Rubbish In Your File

by Allen Wyatt
(last updated July 9, 2012)

One astute WordTips reader reported that they started receiving complaints from clients about their Word 97 document files. It seemed that whenever they opened a saved document, the files had "rubbish" added to the end of them.

Upon closer examination, it was found that the default file type for the Open dialog box had been set to Recover Text From Any File. This caused Word to ignore the formatting information it normally saves at the end of a file, and instead try to treat it as regular text. The result was that any time the client opened a file, the formatting was stripped from the document and appeared as "rubbish" in the document. The solution was to make sure the file type was instead set to Word Documents.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (1260) applies to Microsoft Word 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003.

Author Bio

Allen Wyatt

With more than 50 non-fiction books and numerous magazine articles to his credit, Allen Wyatt is an internationally recognized author. He  is president of Sharon Parq Associates, a computer and publishing services company. ...

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