On Wed, 25 Jan 2006 10:51:05 -0800, PML
wrote:

I have a WORD document open that is Not Responding. I am afraid if I close
WORD, I will lose my work. I don't see the file in my AutoRecover folder, but
I have the ~$ version of the file. Does anyone know how to open or decode
these files? When I try to open it in WORD it prompts me for a File
Conversion and just gibberish comes out.

Thanks,

I have some bad news... You've probably already lost any work that
wasn't already saved. At this point you won't make it any worse by
using Task Manager to terminate the WinWord.exe process. When you
restart Word, if you get something usable from AutoRecover then you're
ahead of the game.

The ~$ file doesn't contain any part of your document; it's an "owner
file" that tells Word who has the file open. This is discussed in the
article http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=211632 about temporary
files. If you find some of the other files mentioned there, you might
recover some bits of the document, but it'll be like a scattered
jigsaw puzzle.

For future safety, see these two articles:
http://www.gmayor.com/automatically_backup.htm
http://www.gmayor.com/what_to_do_when_word_crashes.htm

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP FAQ: http://word.mvps.org
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