To ask you to HELP me not to fail uni urgently

[fuckingwankingshittycomputer]

My computer is old I hate it

It's a mac

I need to submit as .doc

Weeks of work has now changed to bloody symbols that are unreadable

Last time it worked simply by saving as .doc

I am panicking please tell me this is easily fixed

I do have an old draft version worst case scenario but I've just lost a few days worth of formatting, spell checking and making sure I haven't accidentally plagiarised anything

No textwrangler

This crap...

Revert to saved does nothing

No advice but I really feel for you.

Good luck. 🤞🏻🤞🏻🤞🏻

Encoding isn't the same thing as file type. Roman is fine. That's not the problem. Ignore that dropdown list, that's the wrong place for the file type.

That's in the Save dialogue box somewhere, but I haven't got a 10.6 (?) Mac anywhere anymore to check exactly.

Have you tried to undo, undo, undo...?

Have you made a copy or two of the current file, so you can't break it any further by experimenting? Do so now.

What might have happened is you've saved it as a doc file, but then opened it again as a text file. Please post a photo of the corrupted text - it's pretty easy to tell if that's the case, for those of us who look inside corrupted files for a living...

Undo is greyed out (can't click)

Photo upthread few posts though

Ack - xposted.

Wow. I've never seen that particular sort of mess before... looks like an ASCII representation of graphics data, do you have pics in your file?

Something else to try:

Close down the file and TextEdit.

In Finder, rightclick/option-click the file and go to Get Info.

If "Hide Extension" is ticked, untick it. I'm hoping this now shows your file with something NOT .doc on.

If it isn't doc, change the "Name and Extension" to file.doc and re-open it.

No idea what type of mac... possibly snow leopard era but no idea really just relative said snow leopard once why I'm thinking that

I'm crap with technology- can you tell? 🙈

Also, when you did the "save as" "Word", it would have left the original rtf file behind. It doesn't change the file, it saves a new copy as the .doc

Are you sure you haven't got that?

What a nightmare. Hopefully one of these tech savvy posters will crack it for you. It’s all gobbledegook to me sorry

Yes have tables etc

Found get info several times- lost it again

Nothing under desktop though or the folder it's saved in

You can get to Get Info by selecting the file and hitting cmd-I

Have one rtf prior to my hours of work

Nothing with what I hoped as I just saved as

Have you looked in Spotlight for your original file name? It's the magnifying glass at the top. Type in the old filename, or the paper title, or some other sentence that only appears in the paper.

Save As does not overwrite/delete the original file. It's still there somewhere unless you deleted it while flapping around.
In which case look in the trash.

Extension is now .docx (as I tried that earlier upthread)

I don't think TextEdit in 10.6 (snow leopard) understands .docx, try closing it again, renaming to .doc and reopening

Do the cmd-I on it in finder for Get Info and check the full name in case it's got a hidden extension that's wrong. Like .txt.

Put up a pic of the Get Info?

Changed to .doc but same thing... extension is .doc

Just gonna try renaming as rtf in case

Rtf has a pretty thumbnail but can't be opened

Extension is .rtf

Bleh. Not sure what's happened there then. You could mail me a copy of the file (I'm 45 and gainfully employed, I'm not on your course), I'll drop you a DM.

Back to Spotlight - the magnifying glass near the clock in the menubar. Can that find your paper? Stick the title or a distinctive phrase into it.

Spotlight can't find the version I spent hours on and saved as (prior to fuck up)

I do have copy I can work from over again failing all else

Thank you, I would email if it didn't include other students details on work we did together etc but I can't erase any personal details on the fucked version as I don't know where they are now

Yeah, fair enough.

So annoying though. See that "Content created: Yesterday 23:29"? That was the first time that file existed, after the Save As.

The old file should still be there somewhere... only way it won't is if you'd managed to save over it at some point with the bad file. Which is vaguely possible with all the renaming, I guess? Should have refused though.

Looks like you've got a boring tomorrow morning going back to the old version and re-formatting it :(

Remember to take a backup copy of it before modifying it! Backups are the best thing ever, and you really should enable Time Machine to an external USB drive.

I don't think it's coming back... I've given up for tonight I think, left computer on in hope... dcs are at school for 7.30 so enough time to tell work and uni I have cocked up and will have to sort

I should do lots of things with computer- but lobbing it out the window seems most attractive. If I don't though once this is in I will definitely look at what I can do to prevent this ever again if not got new one on its way

Thank you though!

The basic safety net is "take backups before you do anything". You can do that manually but people forget so the automatic Time Machine would do that very well, taking a copy every hour so you'd lose an hour's work max. You do need an external drive though, either a USB stick or a hard drive. Little diddy USB sticks are a good bet - needs to be big enough to take all your files, www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01BGTG2A0?tag=mumsnetforum-21

A Mac running a slightly later version of MacOS (10.7 and later) would have versioning and rollback built in, even without Time Machine. Like "undo" but better. Hopefully the disability stuff comes through...