Repair a damaged or corrupt Word document

Posted on September 9, 2008 at 5:40 am

Need to repair or fix a corrupt Word document? Sometimes a Word document from a different version of Office or after being transferred from a different computer, will give you an error stating that the document cannot be read because it is corrupt or because there is some problem with the file.

Usually it’s just a problem with the headers in the file and you can recover most of your Word document most of the time. Here are the error messages you might see:

“Word was unable to read this document. It may be corrupt” or

“The Office Open XML file Test Doc.docx cannot be opened because there are problems with the contents”

How to fix corrupt Word Document

To repair a damaged Word doc, open MS Word and click on File and then Open as if you were normally going to open the file.

Now select the file you want to open by single-clicking on it, do not double-click the file. Now instead of clicking on Open, click on the small arrow at the far right of the Open button and choose Open and Repair.

That’s it! Word will repair the document and open it for you. Now if for some reason the built-in repair feature of Word does not work, you can also download a free program that does uses some more advanced techniques to repair corrupt Word documents.

Repair My Word is a great little freeware app that can not only help with the corruption errors but also with Word errors such as

“The document name or path is not valid. Try these suggestions. Check the file permissions for the document or drive. Use the File Open dialog box to locate the document.”

“Word cannot open the document: user does not have access privileges.”

“Word cannot open the document.”

Finally, you can check out the Microsoft KB article how to troubleshoot Word document errors here. Hopefully, you can now open your Word file! Also, check out my post on how to backup or save a Word document automatically so that you don’t lose important files. Enjoy!

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5 Responses to “Repair a damaged or corrupt Word document”

Pratik Sonpal said on : September 12th, 2008 at 10:10 am

Cool man…..It worked with ease…..These word recovery softwares are of no use…..This one is enough…..

zlatan24 said on : October 4th, 2008 at 4:41 am

I heard about not bad application-Fix Word, it may recover information from corrupted Microsoft Word documents and templates, allows users to avoid losing data important for them. Indeed, Microsoft Word is nowadays the most popular tool for creating any documents, including corporate ones.

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September 21st, 2008 at 5:34 am