Knowledgebase: Microsoft Word
When you open a MS Word file in a different word processor, such as WordPad, it contains lots of meaningless characters that appear to be gibberish.
Posted by - NA - on 21 March 2006 07:27 AM
Solution:
This is by design. When you view a DOC file in Word, you see text, images, and whatever else you have added to the document, but you don't see the binary formatting code that lurks at the top and bottom of the document. This code stores all of the layout selections you made when creating the document and tells Word how to format and display it. Word is designed to hide the formatting code, but WordPad and other text editors aren't. As such, they read this formatting code as if it belongs in the body of the document and do what they can to display the code as text. This leads to blocks of gibberish at the beginning and end of the file, and if you delete this "corruption," you will lose all of the formatting information for that document when you open it in Word.

Note that this can work to your advantage. If a Word document becomes corrupted and will open only in WordPad or another editor that displays the formatting code, strip all of the code out of the document and save it. You'll lose the formatting, of course, but the file will no longer be corrupted and you should have no trouble opening it in Word.
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