A friend brought me a floppy on which he had been saving a Word document. When he tried to open it this morning he couldn't. The file now has the extension .prn instead of .doc. He doesn't know what happened. What does .prn stand for and can this file be fixed?
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corrupt word document
- Thread starter linda55
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Microsoft formal advice is that you should not edit office documents on a floppy. Typically applications need as working space twice the size of the base file so on a floppy you can very easily run out of space. To take a simple example, you might edit a document but choose not to save it so Office has to have the working copy and the original version both available till you close.
You should therefore always edit files from a hard disk. After they have been saved and closed you can copy to a floppy for transport. It also means that if anything has gone wrong you have another copy on the hard disk.
prn normally indicates a "printer" file. You can generate one by selecting File, Print and ticking the print to file option. If created in that way the data is what the printer expects to receive and the format is not recoverable by Word. The only thing you could do is send the file to a printer of the correct type which would then print it out. You then scan/OCR the result.
Exceptionally a prn file is legible if a specially dummy printer has been set up that prints text only without formatting. In that case the file would be pure text like a notepad file. However, Word would have opened such a file so I fear the data is lost.
You should therefore always edit files from a hard disk. After they have been saved and closed you can copy to a floppy for transport. It also means that if anything has gone wrong you have another copy on the hard disk.
prn normally indicates a "printer" file. You can generate one by selecting File, Print and ticking the print to file option. If created in that way the data is what the printer expects to receive and the format is not recoverable by Word. The only thing you could do is send the file to a printer of the correct type which would then print it out. You then scan/OCR the result.
Exceptionally a prn file is legible if a specially dummy printer has been set up that prints text only without formatting. In that case the file would be pure text like a notepad file. However, Word would have opened such a file so I fear the data is lost.
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