Word and Excel documents open as gibberish

I have some old documents that were not very important to me until now.
They were created using BizPlan Builder templates over a year ago. I
have switched computers, but have still have the files. Now when I go
to open them in Office 2004, I get the "convert file from" dialogue
box, and they open as unrecognizable gibberish. This is true for all
documents in this folder, both text docs and spreadsheets. I even found
other copies of these same docs, and they open the same way.

HELP!!!! Are they forever lost/corrupted?

In article <1126274193.741918.235600.RemoveThis@g44g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>,
"smugdoug" <smugdoug.RemoveThis@gmail.com> wrote:

> I have some old documents that were not very important to me until now.
> They were created using BizPlan Builder templates over a year ago. I
> have switched computers, but have still have the files. Now when I go
> to open them in Office 2004, I get the "convert file from" dialogue
> box, and they open as unrecognizable gibberish. This is true for all
> documents in this folder, both text docs and spreadsheets. I even found
> other copies of these same docs, and they open the same way.
>
> HELP!!!! Are they forever lost/corrupted?

I'm not familiar with BizPlan Builder - Do you have access to it to try
to open them within BB? I suppose it's possible that BB does some sort
of proprietary encryption.

It would be highly unusual for multiple files to corrupt, obviously.
Does BB say what format the files were generated as?