I was working on something on Word when suddenly it crashed. I forced closed the application then reopened it to the file I had been working on (I save it regularly). The text in the document now appears as this:

It went from 600 plain English words to 2,200 words of whatever that is. The font didn't change at all in case you're wondering, still Courier. I checked for some auto-recovery files but there were none there. Anyone have any advice please?

ATRL virus ha impact

Am I not the only one getting blocked from here by chrome because of some malware thing?

Should I even be in here right now disobeying it? Will my essays turn to crud as well?

MaRy, explain yourself

Beyonce, ha impact!

The fact that no one has replied in a serious matter

the only explanation is you are going to be abducted and subsequently impregnated by extra terrestrials in an mpreg experiment. hope you enjoy your new life as an alien father/mother sis bless

Is it a docx file?

Office documents are just a collection of XML files zipped up with a different file extension.

1. Copy the file to a new folder
2. Rename the file from whatever.docx to whatever.zip
3. Unzip the file to the folder
4. Open the word folder (It might already place you in that folder after unzipping)
5. Look for the file document.xml
6. Right click the file and select Open With | Microsoft Word
7. It should prompt you with a bunch of document types select HTML file

Now you should have all the text minus all the XML in a new Word Doc just Save As and make sure to select Word Document because it will still think you are using HTML.

Edit: You will lose all formatting, fonts and styles but there is a chance you can get the text back.

Woah thank you so much for your help!

I did all the steps, found the document.xml file and opened it with my web browser and notepad (Word failed to open the file). Unfortunately, the text is still the foreign text described in the OP (yes each foreign character is surrounded by HTML tags, for example: <w:t>♜</w:t>) but I really appreciate your help. Will definitely utilize your advice if something similar should occur again.

Although I should mention that when I click on the file viewer, it says it has 735 words (I think that's how many the original had) but when I actually open it, that foreign shizz shows up and the word count says there's 2,200 words.

Yeah that sucks, that is a XML <w:t> is a word text tag before that there should be a <w:r> which is a run tag and before that <w: p> for paragraph which is made up of one or more run tags containing text. I can write word documents in XML without word now that I really think about it.

All I can suggest is have auto save on. I have a built in habit of hitting ctrl-s without even thinking about it.

Whats strange is only the font looks screwed up the tags are fine.

The only other option I can think of is open Word and try to repair the document by going to Open select the file but don't open it, in the Open Dialog there will be a [BTools [/B]drop down in the bottom right hand corner, one of the options will be Open and Repair

If that can't fix it then your file is probably toast unless it can find previous versions of it, which is another option from the Tools menu.

This happened to me before about 10 years ago I think I used a online converter or what not

Oh I see. I'm only familiar with HTML tags.

I'll make sure to enable regular auto-saving...

... and enable 'previous versions'. I checked and there none unfortunately and the repair tool was pretty useless in this instance.

All great advice though. I'm sure many other people will read your posts here and find them extremely useful.

Omg. What was the problem called? What should I google search?

I would get a free OneDrive Account from Microsoft the basic tier offers 15GB storage for free. That way you can sync any Office documents up to your OneDrive cloud. It will keep a version history in increments of 5 minutes for the past seven days of all your documents you sync. The OneDrive desktop app integrates right into the file explorer so you can browse your OneDrive without going to the web.

All the documents are private but you can create shares to allow other people to see documents even given them edit abilities.