Formatting Symbol ȳ

Question

I have recently opened a document in Microsoft Word and the last few paragraphs of my text have disappeared and when I put the show/hide function on there are a bunch of this symbol (ȳ) where the text used to be. I have never come across this formatting symbol before. Can anyone tell me what it means and if it's possible to recover my text?

Answer 1

That symbol (actually usually ÿ, I think) could best be described as a "bad sign." It usually indicates irretrievable document corruption. You can try using the Open and Repair option in Word's Open dialog, but you may be out of luck. If you saved this document directly to a flash drive (or opened it from one), that may have caused the problem.

Answer 2

Don't ever save directly to any kind of removable drive. Always save to the HD, then copy to the flash drive. Similarly, don't open a file from the flash drive and work on it. Copy to the HD first, then work on it from there. At the very least, if you must work on a file from a flash drive, go to File | Options | Advanced | Save and check the option to "Copy remotely stored files onto your computer, and update the remote file when saving."

The reason for this is that Word creates many temporary files in the same folder with your document. Although the problem is less acute with a flash drive, it was especially dangerous to work from a floppy because Word could very quickly fill the floppy with temp files. Also, every time you save, Word does a lot of file swapping to replace the current file with the new version and to save the old one as a backup (see “Description of how Word creates temporary files”). If you remove the drive before Word is through with this operation, then you will have hopelessly corrupted the file.

Answer 3

VERY "bad sign".

I was opening the file from a flash drive, does this mean that the flash drive is beginning to corrupt and I should get a new one?

I have copied my text into a new file and deleted and re-written everything that was followed by this symbol. Will that prevent further corruption?

Thanks for your help. :-)