TextEdit RUINED my MS Word document!

[YoYo_Theo]

I am so incredibly pissed off and discouraged right now at my computer. I have this massive binder of notes I have written that I use for work, and once or twice a year I update it with all the additional notes I have. It's like 200 pages long, and right now I have several pages of additional notes to type up. It's my weekend, and for once I decided to be productive, so yesterday I got up early and got started. First off, I discovered that I couldn't open the master document, because I had been using MS Word, and that version of the program is apparently not compatible with my new OSX which I upgraded recently (to 10.8.4). So I read up online, and found several people saying you can use TextEdit to open and edit MS Word documents, you just have to touch up a little bit of the formatting if it doesn't carry over properly. I found that to be true. When I opened it, it looked almost perfect, but I had to re-do all the list bulleting. That took me a few hours, then I spent literally 8-10 hours yesterday, straight, doing updates, adding my new notes to the master document. I'm good about saving. I saved every 2 minutes or so. I even closed it and re-opened it several times, to make sure it was still keeping all my changes, and the formatting.
Then today, I tried to open it, to resume my work (I still had several hours of work to do on it), and when I open it, all I see is a jumble of coding symbols and crap, interspersed between all my text. I freaked out, shut down my computer, rebooted, and tried again. Same thing. So I tried looking through the menus and trying different things like "reverting" it, and "choosing from older versions of it". Nothing worked. I didn't save, of course, because I didn't want to save further screwed up versions. Yet now, when I open it, the document is practically empty. There's like one sentence, mostly symbols. It's apparently totally lost and screwed up. The entire day I spent yesterday working on this is for nothing! I'm going to have to start all over again from the beginning.
Does anybody have any idea what happened, and if there's any way to restore the work I put into this?

 

[Kaveman]

So you didn't make a copy before you started? nor did you work on a Duplicate?

 

[Spawn_Dooley]

Do you have Time Machine ? What is the file extension of the Text Edit file?

You could try Bean, (linky) a free word processing app (compatible with 10.8) that might just open the text edit file without messing it up ??

 

[oldscribe]

Hi,

Text edit is extremely good, personally though when editing MS documents IE from an email, I use pages then export as an MS doc and send back to recipient.