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Need help with .txt file

Ankit Kumar Patel 0 Reputation points
2023-02-24T09:37:50.97+00:00

Hi,

I have a file .txt, I opened it with Word and added some comments and highlighted a lot of text, I kept on saving all the changes. But when I closed the file and re-opened it all the changes dissappeared and I have the same file which I had before adding the changes.

Is there any way to retrieve my changes and formatting from .txt file.

Thank you in advance.

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A family of Microsoft word processing software products for creating web, email, and print documents.
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  1. Alan Farias 750 Reputation points
    2023-02-24T16:01:56.9533333+00:00

    Unfortunately, it's unlikely that you will be able to retrieve your changes and formatting from a .txt file that you have edited and saved in Word. .txt files are plain text files that do not support formatting or the addition of comments. When you open a .txt file in Word, it will prompt you to convert the file to a Word document format, which will allow you to make changes and add formatting. However, if you saved the changes back to the .txt format, it would have overwritten the original file with the unformatted text.

    If you haven't closed the file yet, you could try using the "Undo" function in Word to see if you can undo the changes you made. If that doesn't work, you could also try using a file recovery tool to see if you can recover an earlier version of the file before you made the changes. Some examples of file recovery tools include Recuva, Disk Drill, and EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard. However, please note that the success of file recovery depends on many factors, and there is no guarantee that you will be able to recover your changes.

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  2. Stefan Blom 2,126 Reputation points MVP
    2023-02-26T02:11:44.6466667+00:00

    You can't save formatting to a *.txt file (which only contains plain text).

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  3. Emily Hua-MSFT 27,556 Reputation points
    2023-02-27T02:27:38.6766667+00:00

    Hi @Ankit Kumar Patel

    Please refer to replies from Alan Farias and Stefan Blom.

    .txt files can not save formatting, like the following image shown, it is by design.

    Capture60

    I would like to suggest you add comments and change formatting from scratch in a document in .docx and other formats.

    Thanks for your understanding.

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