All my word files are no longer in English. Looks like symbols. Had a new hard drive installed.

[AprilMay]

I had a new hard drive installed and the technician said he transferred ALL files onto it.  My word program is here but all 400+ files are no longer in English.  The words are gibberish with symbols and numbers.  I tried using the language tool but nothing changes.

How can I restore all my word files back into English?

The technician said he had no idea how/why that happened because all he did was transfer files onto new hard drive.

[iomare]

Hi,

Just a couple of questions. What OS are you using? What program and edition of word are you using? Are the documents .doc or .docx?

Have you tried copying one of the files onto pendrive and opening on different computer?

Let me know,

David

[mdklassen]

> My word program is here but all 400+ files are no longer in English.  The words are gibberish ..

Did you have Microsoft Word 2007/2010/2013/2016 on your previous disk-drive?

Do you now have Microsoft Word 2003 (or earlier) on your system?

There is a free download from Microsoft to "upgrade" Word 2003 to be able to correctly process files created by the newer versions of Word.

See: https://www.microsoft.com/en-ca/download/details.aspx?id=3

Download & run this update.