Office Documents In Trouble!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[ask_livewire]

I Recently Had A Virus In My Pc Which I Believe Was Then Sorted Out By Norton 06, But Then I Got Some Indications Of Spam On My Pc Which Was Then Taken Care Of By A Remover, Now When After A Few Days When I Tried To View Some Of My Documents Which Are Stored In .doc Or .xls Format, It Just Shows An Error Which Says That The Format In Which In The Document Is Stored Is Inrecognizable, I Am A Tax Consultant And My Job Was Dependant On The Previous Worksheet Which I Created In Excel, I Also Tried Importing Text But To No Use. All My Documents In Word And Excel Now Stand Crapped And I Am In A Very Good Trouble. Please Help Me Outta This Mess!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1

[iinfi]

i used to support MS word 2000 2002 n 2003 in windows platform when i was in wipro for 4 months. usually when we had customers with similar issues we found it hard to recover it. i dont know whether there are any other third party tools to recover such files.
well with ur word files i can definitely try to help u. can u zip some of ur documents and mail it to me at iinfi@yahoo.com , if they r not confidential documents. i will jus c if anything can be done.
send ur excel spreadsheets also ... zip them n send i ll see how i can help u

[romeo_8693]

have u tried opening the.doc files in notepad..???formatting wont be shown.....atleast ul come to know that the data in them is intact....just a sugestion...

[iinfi]

well he has not sent me any files. i think he has not read the replies.
first option is to open it in word pad ... not notepad.
then search for temporary files for files with word symbols as icons and try n open them in word.

[romeo_8693]

said notepad coz notepad seems to open evrything!!!! )

[iinfi]

i beg to differ with u. its not the correct procedure. and btw notepad does not open word documents. forget formatting but it retains only a small percentage of text from gud files, leave alone corrupt or virus affected files.
one must always take proper backups of one's work either on a DVD/CD or any online storage like ur Gmail.

while in WBPO we had customers whose file contents turned into boxes overnite due to some reason. may b a macro-virus or some other reasons. in such cases there is no way to recover them. i had one customer whose 2000-3000 word documents in his PC whose contents had turned into boxes.
another customer who had backed up everything on a non-rewritable CD but still had its contents alone with the ones on his HDD turned into boxes. the back up was take long b4 the files in the PC had been affected.

[eddie]

Originally Posted by iinfi

another customer who had backed up everything on a non-rewritable CD but still had its contents alone with the ones on his HDD turned into boxes. the back up was take long b4 the files in the PC had been affected.

...and you told him that they were unrecoverable? :O

Anyways, imho copy your documents on a CD/DVD and try to open them on a different system then yours. If they open there, then most probably just your Office installation has got screwed otherwise your files have been corrupted by the virus. If the files themselves are damaged then try to search on Google for microsoft office document recovery software. There are many and almost all of them provide demo software. Install them and see if any of them recover your docs. If any of them do, then you can buy its full version and use it to get your docs back.

A word of advice would be to back up your data on some non-rewritable media. Do it even now. May be your office installation has gone bad and every file you try to open with this install gets corrupted while the files originally were not bad. So write some CDs right now and then try what ever you need/want to.

[ilugd]

good point eddie about taking a backup even now. I have messed up many times, and in hindsight, if i had taken a backup before any experimentation with problems, i would have saved myself a lot of trouble. Quiet a few times, it has been MY tampering which has worsened problems. Thanks for the sensible advice

[romeo_8693]

@iinfi
thanks for the correction!!!

[ask_livewire]

thank you so much guys that u guys are trying to help me out. i've already tried backing them up on someone else's PC, but the same problem arises, anyways, i'll be sending you people copies of my 'not-so-confidential' documents and spreadsheets, it was infii who had recieved such a problem, some part of the document (almost every part of the document) has turned into boxes and thus nothing is visible, although i had some spreadsheets which showed some parts of figures which i could make out the meaning of. i am using a public pc and thus do not have my documents with me now, n i am facing some hardware problems with my monitor at the office, but as soon as i fix it i'll be sending u guys the attachments of those docs and .xls files, please quote ur email ids so that even u guys can do RND on my docs