"Cindy M -WordMVP-" wrote in message
news:VA.0000bb27.007a2317@speedy...
Hi ?B?ZW5pZ21hNjY2?=,

I was playing around with formatting. I selected the full text
[two
pages] and changed the style from new roman to webdings. I went
back to the
text a couple of days later. I 'selected all' and tried to change
it back to
new roman. All i got was a text document full of identical
squares. Can
anyone help me, it was an important document that i should not
have used for
practice :-(

A "style" in word is a named set of formatting specifications. You
didn't change
the "style", just the font formatting. This in the interest of
avoiding
confusion if you post a question in the future where it's not so
clear what you
really did :-)

The problem with applying a symbol type of font is that it makes
fundamental
changes in the way Word stores the text. Used to be, a font could
contain only
512 characters, at the most. Then they introduced Unicode, and a
font can
contain tens of thousands of characters. If you mix the two, at the
end Word may
not longer be able to match up the characters from the one font with
the
original.

The unicode information is available in clear text if the document
is saved as
HTML or XML. With a bit of work, someone should be able to figure
out which
unicode matches which "plain text" and reconvert the document. But
it would take
some time (= money). There might even be professionals or software
out there
already to do the job. But there's not going to be any "simple" way
for you to
get the text back within the Word interface.


But for a two-page document, saving as HTML and then copying and
pasting plain text (from the HTML source) into a fresh document seems
possible to do manually. Of course, it could be difficult to recreate
the formatting.

--
Stefan Blom
Microsoft Word MVP