Tips of the Week - Information Technology

Technology Tip of the Week - April 17, 2006

Rescuing a Corrupted Word Document

Once in a while a Word document will become corrupted and no matter what you try, you can't fix it. If you can still open the document but can't work with it or revise it, here's a quick trick to rescue your document.

Open your Word document

Click on the Show/Hide button on your toolbar to reveal the paragraph, tab and space marks if they are not already showing (tip: this button looks like a paragraph symbol)

Scroll down to the very last sentence of the document.

In Word, all the formatting instructions for a document are held in the very last paragraph mark, so this is often where the corrupted code is as well. With this in mind, locate the very last paragraph mark in the document

Click to the left of the paragraph mark and hold your left mouse button down as you drag all the way up to the beginning of the document. This should select everything in the document EXCEPT the final paragraph mark

Now click on Edit-Copy

Open a new document (File - New... Blank Document) and choose Edit - Paste

Once all your text is in the new document, save the document with a new name.

That's it. Your new document should now behave normally.

Note that with this trick, you may have to do some re-formatting as you may lose some of it - but it sure beats retyping!

For more help with this feature, please contact one of the faculty mentors - Tony Basilico (abasilico@ccri.edu) or Luis Malaret (lmalaret@ccri.edu) or one of the IT Instructional Support team (Norm Grant, Gene Grande or Linda Beith).

Website of the Week

Teachers Tend to Teaching by James Todd

Community college faculty are used to focusing on teaching but for many universities teaching skills have taken a back seat to research efforts. In this article by James Todd of Duke University has gathered together ten teaching tips from award-winning instructors for colleagues to consider http://www.dukenews.duke.edu/2006/03/costl.html in promoting teaching excellence.

Feel free to post your thoughts or opinions of this site in the Teaching Forum message board.

These tips are provided by the Department of Information Technology instructional support team. If you have any questions on these tips, or wish to offer your own, please feel free to contact Linda Beith at lbeith@ccri.edu. View an archive of past technology tips at http://it.ccri.edu/Training/Tips/tip_week.shtml.