Text has disappeared in Word for Mac

This is weird. I turned on the computer today most of the documents that I have in Qord for Macc (2008) have much of the text invidible. I tried converting to PDF and the words are simply not their. Some text, such as the ToC and words in tables, remains, but main body text is gone.
How doe I fix this?
Thanks

Skreef wrote:
much of the text invidible […] main body text is gone.
Is the text invisible (it's there, but you can't see it) or is it gone (it's no longer there)?
In Word, save one such document as plain text. Then open the text file with text editor. Does it contain the text in question, or doesn't it?

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