Recover “corrupted” (asterisks) Word document on macbook

**I did not write this but LITERALLY THE EXACT SAME ISSUE HAPPENED TO ME** SOMEONE PLEASE HELP: Dear Freelancer.com, I would be forever grateful if someone could manage to help me recover my “corrupted” Word document on my macbook: if you already came across the issue and could monitor what I have to do or redirect me towards someone who knows about how to solve this since it is not your core activity, it would be very very much appreciated. The document is my master thesis which I need to submit next week and I have just lost all my work, as very unfortunately this document was the only copy I had. Below I explain in more detail what happened and what I have tried so far, I sincerely hope someone at Freelancer.com can help me! Thanks a LOT, Marlyse What happened: Last night I was working on the 28 pages long document on Word on my Macbook, and suddenly all the text turned into asterisks. Not knowing what to do I saved and closed the document, but I haven't been able to recover its text since then. The “corrupted” document is now 22 pages long, and full of asterisks except for the numbering of the sources which is still there (see picture attached), suggesting some information from the original document could be under the asterisks. When I open a new document in Word, I can write just fine, without asterisks. Things tried that haven’t worked: - copy pasting the text into another software such as OpenOffice, Pages, TextEdit - saving the document under a new name as plain text, but the asterisks remain (on mac and PC) - opening the document on a PC - renaming the document and opening it on a PC - checking the Autosave Recovery folder on my macbook (only very few documents there, all several months old) - checking the TemporaryFiles folder of the macbook (not much there either) - checking the bin, there are 2 recovered files but their creation time is 9min after the incident and I cannot read the files in them (see attached) - are they useful? How could I open them? - trying to update the version of Word that I have, however I get an error message, and after some research, it seems Microsoft has discontinued anything related to that my Word 2011 version ([login to view URL]) - downloading Stellar Phoenix Mac Data Recovery in order to recover deleted files, in the hope of finding the Autosave file that was automatically deleted when I pressed Save (as explained here [login to view URL] ) I am not familiar with this software so I am not sure I have done everything right in what I have tried: I tested the normal recovery and the raw recovery. Normal recovery didn't get me many word documents, they seemed to be the ones I already had on my computer. The raw recovery was more complete, I analysed all the items in the Documents>Office folder. Unfortunately I couldn't find my thesis but recognised recent other files I still have on my computer (not several versions of them however) Software information: - my macbook runs under OS X version 10.10.5 - I have Word 2011 version 14.0.0 (100825), with autosave every 10min turned on, but back-up copy creation was not turned on