Windows 10: SOS: Dad deleted 50K words of his book in Word, how to restore?

Hi everyone,

Hoping you can help us. My dad is writing a book and isn't the most technologically saavy person and has basically been typing it up in one Word document and saving it (ie doesn't have previous versions or backups, just keeps adding to the original doc). The file is saved in Documents on OneDrive.

When he was writing the other day, something happened and the entire document went blank. The auto-recovered version of the doc is blank. For some reason, when he tries to reopen the doc it only shows what was saved as of 9/15/19, even though he has opened and saved that doc many times since then.

Is there anyway to boot up a more recent backup? I honestly have no idea what happened to make it go blank but my dad is devastated. He lost almost half of his book. Would really appreciate any advice or help you can offer us. He is on a surface using Microsoft 10 Pro.

:)

 

(MS Word) auto window restoring

Ok, When I have a word file open, i minimize that word window to open another word file. but what does word do?! it opens new word window as well as restores other minimized word window!!! *Bang Head :banghead:
this is just killing me! I checked all option and googled all i could

the guy in the link below has the same problem:
Chris Pirillo is creating Weekly Fun Videos with Jedi | Patreon

I have XP and MS Office 2007

 

microsoft word 2003

In the past year or so I've noticed another quirk where a downloaded Word document or other Office document won't open regardless of the steps I take to open them. After deleting the file and re-downloading the document it opens without issue. I've been using Chrome almost exclusively so I'm not sure if I've experienced this with Explorer or Firefox. So one last step to try might be to obtain another copy of your files if they are being generated and fetched externally to your system (ie. try downloading them again as the file might have simply been corrupted).

 

microsoft word 2003

Very ineteresing and unknown method for me. I'll apply it, many thanks!