G'day there One & All, I've been given a large file by a friend of mine who's been writing a book. He was in the habit of writing a few pages at home, (on his crappy old machine) then bringing it in on disk to work and adding those pages. The result is a 20 Meg file containing in-line pictures in both .jpg & .png format. Eventually he was unable to open the file on the work computer, had no backup & since I'm computer support officer he turned to me for assistance. I've got his file at home on my machine and found that I couldn't open it as a native Word file either. It will open with the "Recover Text from any File" function of the Open dialogue, but naturally it's just the plain text. I've been able to use DocRepair to get something out of it, and it seems that nearly all of his graphics are corrupted. Now whether there was a corrupted graphic that killed the Word file, or a corrupted Word file killed his graphics, I can't tell. Is there anyway I can save the Word file from conversion to a plain text file? I'd like to keep what I can of the formatting information and/or graphic placeholders for the pix but everything I try leaves me with a plain text file only. Anyone have any ideas at all? TIA Ken McLennan Brisbane, Australia

There are "Word File Recovery" programs out there - I looked but couldn't find you a free one, I'm afraid. Search Google, and you'll get a million choices if you want to pay. (Cheapest I saw was $25) Other possibilities include downloading the "Word Document Viewer" from Microsoft, and seeing if you can get any joy through that. Tom

G'day there Tom, Thanks for that. I'll go and have a look at the MS site now and get the viewer. With a bit of luck I may have a positive result shortly. Many thanks for your assistance, See ya Ken McLennan Brisbane, Australia

In case you're having fun trying to find the viewer, this is the link (unless they changed it since I last looked LOL): http://www.microsoft.com/office/000/viewers.htm

Ken...also try this recovery program... It's about US$30 or so... I have used numerous times very successfully...also you could drop a line to the folks who created this proggy, (they have been very helpfull to me on a couple of occasions) and see if they have a better solution... www.jufsoft.com Bad Copy Pro v3.65 I have used Bad Copy to recover lots of Word and Excel files from floppys that have gone bad...my recovery rate has been about 95%... Now, you need to talk to your friend about backups and other necessary stuff... Good luck Steve