Document turned into asterisks

Question

My whole document turned into asterisks. I undoed it and it was still the stars. I have tried closing and reopening the document and nothing has worked. Microsoft phone support couldn't help. Can anyone help me?

Answer 1

Yes.  This is a known bug, which was cured by an update.

Go to Help>Check for Updates, and run that until it says you are fully up-to-date.

If you have set the preference "Word>Preferences>Save>"Always create backup" then a backup of your work is in the same folder as the original, labelled "Backup of..."

If that preference was OFF, then sorry, nobody can help you, you have lost the document.  It was gone anyway, but when you closed Word, that deleted the AutoRecover file which might have saved you had you been quick enough.

The AutoRecover mechanism will not operate until a) you have saved the document, and b) Word knows that it has crashed.  If this happens again, immediately use Force Quit from the Apple menu to kill the Word process.  If you are quick enough to do it before the next autorecovery save, your original document will be recovered when Word re-starts.

Hope this helps

Answer 2

This happened even with the update just before 10/19/2014. Kind of scary.

Does this happen only with the mac version or all word versions?

Answer 3

And you are thanking John ; you should be immediately updateing Office to the latest version of Office. Which at this moment of writing is 14.4.1

Answer 4

Yes.  This is a known bug, which was cured by an update.

Go to Help>Check for Updates, and run that until it says you are fully up-to-date.

If you have set the preference "Word>Preferences>Save>"Always create backup" then a backup of your work is in the same folder as the original, labelled "Backup of..."

If that preference was OFF, then sorry, nobody can help you, you have lost the document.  It was gone anyway, but when you closed Word, that deleted the AutoRecover file which might have saved you had you been quick enough.

The AutoRecover mechanism will not operate until a) you have saved the document, and b) Word knows that it has crashed.  If this happens again, immediately use Force Quit from the Apple menu to kill the Word process.  If you are quick enough to do it before the next autorecovery save, your original document will be recovered when Word re-starts.

Hope this helps

You saved my life! the same thing happened to me and i read this within seconds. I was able to Force quit and recover my unsaved document. Thank you so much!!