Tuesday, September 16, 2008

How Do I Repair a Corrupted Word File? (Corrupted Microsoft Word Files that Won’t Open)


How to repair a corrupted Microsoft Word file that would not open?
Corrupted Word filesrefers to files that you tried to open in Word, and couldn’t for some reason. Sometimes you would get a message that they are corrupted, whereas other times Word would simply say that it can’t open them.
Follow The Steps:
1. Check that the corrupted Word file name is in the format “name.doc” (where name is the name of your file, then a dot (*.*) then the extension “doc”. For example file.doc. If it isn’t, right click on the file, select “Rename” and change the file’s name to this format.
2. Some newer versions of Word (e.g. Microsoft Word 2007) have a repair option.
To see if yours does, open Word, select File–>> Open, choose the corrupted file (but don’t open it yet). You will notice that next to where it says “Open”, there is a little drop-down arrow. Click on this and change the option to “Open and Repair”, then click on it.
3. If the above didn’t work, the next option (which usually works) is to open your corrupted Word file with Open Office - a free office suite that is compatible with Microsoft Word documents. Here’s how:
- Download Open Office from OpenOffice.org - it’s completely free, but is a big download, so will take some time, depending on your connection speed.
- Click on the downloaded file to install it and follow the installation wizard.
- From your Program Files menu open “Openoffice.org Writer” (Go to 

Start>> Programs>> Openoffice.org >>openoffice.org Writer)
- Now use Open office Writer to open your corrupted file (File>>open)
- Once opened, save it again using File>>Save As and ensure you
change the “Save as type” in the menu to Microsoft Word 97/2000/xp (or the version that you have).
- Open your reclaimed file in Word.
4. Still no luck? The next step is to use the free WordRepair utility as a last resort. It was free at the time of writing, and does a good job of opening corrupted Word files, but you lose all your formatting, and hence it is the last on this list.
[If all the above didn’t work, it is likely that your file is in a really bad way.]
 If you are a business and it is business critical, then there are professionals who may be able to help. If your corrupted file is encrypted or password protected, then your changes are lessened still.
Good luck! -J

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I was in this situation some times ago,and used-software repair word files,because it is free as how as i remember,also program solve problem of corrupted text Microsoft Word documents and templates, as well as documents in the Rich Text format,restore .doc and .docx, .dot and .dotx, .rtf,saving the file to the hard drive, it moves to the last step and displays the report where you can see information about all processes involved in recovering information from Microsoft Word documents and templates and performed during the current session of the Word recover file tool,allows you to effectively remover text from any corrupted Microsoft Word document or template or any document of the Rich Text format,sotware compatible with Windows Vista and can repair .docx files of Word 2007,software repair word files through network.

Nithin Mohan said...

Thanx For Sharing :)

repair excel said...

Stellar Phoenix Word Recovery software is the foremost and the most trustworthy word repair software which can perform word repair in an effective manner. This word repair software works well with all the file versions of Word together with Word 2003, XP (2002), and 2000 and very well supports RTF format.

Nithin Mohan said...

Thanx for this Info.

Alexis said...

Some days ago my friend had the problem.And he told me how he solved it.All his doc files were corrupted and he didn't know what to do.But he accidentally found in google next program-repair a docx file.It solved the problem in 30 seconds,moreover he knew how utility recover corrupted files in .doc, .docx, .dot and dotx format, as well as *.rtf (Rich Text format).