Microsoft document full of little squares

Hello Listers,

A family historian has sent me an attachment, supposedly a work document,
but when I try to open it, it is all little squares, no typing. Has anyone
an idea of how I can adjust this document so that I can read it?

Lesley Robertson...

Two possibilities - are you trying to read it in the right text editor? eg
is it a Works ms you're reading in Word? Or do you have version differences?
Is it set for a font that your printer doesn't do? Try selecting the whole
thing and chaning the font.

Alternatively, ask your contact to send you a text or rtf (rich text)
version that can be read by anything.
Lesley Robertson

Kathryn Rogers

Paul Blair...

This is probably an older file, and Word, when it opens it, tries to
convert it to a more modern (or compliant) format. The problem that
sometimes occurs is that Word opens the file, converts it (badly) then
writes the bad conversion back over the original. At that stage, you
have no options.

To prevent this, in Tools | Options | General, set the option to always
confirm the conversion when opening a file. (everyone should do this!!!)

If you now open the text file, Word will ask you what format it is
(select Encoded text), and you should get a dialog where you can
specify the code page that was used for the text file.

The dialog also has a preview window. If neither "Windows text" nor "MS
DOS text" does the trick, check "other encoding" and scan through the
offered code pages until you find one that shows the text correctly.

A bit hit and miss, but it usually works.