In this article we will talk about how to change the encoding in Word. The concept itself will be considered and methods by which this manipulation can be performed will be proposed. By the way, there will be two ways, but they differ from each other quite strongly, which is why it is worth reading the article to the end in order to determine for yourself the method that works best.
What is the problem?
Initially, it’s worth talking about why the user sometimes has to resort to changing the encoding of the text, and only then move on to how to change it in Word.
In fact, there is no problem. Just a program can determine one encoding, but not another. More precisely, the program determines any encoding, but in automatic mode it does not always do this. To fully understand the essence of the issue, it is worth giving an example. Suppose one "Word" document was created in China, where it opens perfectly and there are no "squiggles". However, having thrown the same document to a user from Russia, after opening it will be impossible to read. All this is because different countries use their own text encoding. So, Unicode, which is also called UTF-8, predominates in us, which is why it is set by default in the program, and in China they use the Chinese traditional one called Big5, and there it is this encoding that is considered standard. So it turns out that files created in one region are often impossible to open in another without changing the encoding in the program.
Definition
We talked in detail about the essence of the problem, now we can go directly to the definition, and only then we will touch on how to change the encoding in Word.
An encoding is a symbol scheme (more often - numbers) in which a certain block corresponds to a specific symbol in the language. The document carries only one scheme, and the program already converts it into text. By the way, regional dependence also appears because the same scheme for different languages cannot be done, which is why a huge number of different encodings were created.
Change on Opening
Now let's talk about how to change the encoding in Word. The method that will now be presented involves carrying out this action when opening the document.
So, to make all the settings, you must:
Open a document. You can also open the program itself without it, this is permissible.
Click on the "File" button.
Go to the Options menu. This item is located at the bottom of the panel on the left.
Go to the "Advanced" section.
In the window, scroll down the menu to the "General" group, put a check mark next to "Confirm file format conversion on opening."
Click OK.
So we told the program that when opening files we want to carry out additional settings with them. So now you need to close the program, run the problem file with the wrong code.
In Word 2010, you can change the encoding in the same way, just instead of the File menu, you need to click the MS Office button.
When you open, you will see the "File Conversion" window, you need to go to the "Coded Text" menu in it.
In the upper part of the window, check the "Other" box so that the list on the right becomes active.
In the list, select the file encoding. By the way, if you don’t know which encoding of the document you can click on each one at a time, looking at the result in the “Sample” window. And when the text becomes readable, click OK.
This was the first way to change the encoding of text in Word. And now we immediately proceed to the second.
Change on Save
So, before us is open a file with the wrong encoding in the program, to fix this, you need:
Click "File".
Go to the "Save As" section.
Name the file.
Select the file type "Plain Text".
Click the "Save" button.
In the window that appears, as in the previous method, specify the correct encoding.
Click OK.
That's all. Now you know how to change the encoding in Word.