Word doc help - urgent

[subseastu]

morning all

Got a problem with a word document. It opened up ok yesterday but I've tried to open it today and it comes up with a box on the screen for file conversion asking to select encoding to make it readable! No matter which encoding I pick its all just gibberish on the screen. All my other word documents open ok, its just this one that won't and trust it to be one that I really need to get into! Its kept on a external hard drive if that makes a difference. Please help

[joebloggs]

its been saved in a different version of office, open it on the pc you created it on and save it in a different format eg RTF (rich text format), word 97-2003 format,

or download some convertion program/add ons

or

if you've got a gmail account try upload it to goolge DOCs

[Dedworth]

Would it be anything to do with .doc and .docx files ?

[subseastu]

its been saved in a different version of office, open it on the pc you created it on and save it in a different format eg RTF (rich text format), word 97-2003 format,

or download some convertion program/add ons

or

if you've got a gmail account try upload it to goolge DOCs

Thanks for the suggestions, but;
Google docs can't download it because it says the contents of the file do not match the file extension.
I wrote the file on the laptop that i'm using now, I had the file open yesterday but now its not opening up. Its not allowing me to save the file in a different format

[joebloggs]

maybe you've renamed the file extension on the file by accident

find the file (probably in 'my docs') and see what the file extension is. probably should be xxxx.doc , maybe you've ren the doc part to something else ??

or right click the file and select 'open with' and try and open it with 'wordpad'