Trouble with a newly created document

[Walter H. van Holst]

Hello all,

  I am in the process of writing a thesis and I have decided to use Lyx 
for this purpose. However, as soon as I use the File-View DVI menu, an 
error message appears telling me that there are multiple errors in my 
document. All these errors are as follows:

LaTeX error: Missing \begin{document}.}
You're in trouble here. Try typing <return> to proceed. If that doesn't 
work, type X <return> to quit.

Which is rather confusing. Does anyone have a pointer on how to solve this?

Regards,

Walter H. van Holst