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!

» Filed Under MS Office Tips

Comments

13 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.

Oten said on : December 12th, 2008 at 4:30 am

I managed to open my corrupted Microsoft Office WORD document (with similar error symptoms as mentioned in this article) using OPEN OFFICE. There was no other things that I need to follow, just open the document and save it as MS WORD 97/2000/XP format. That’s it!

Caitlyn said on : January 3rd, 2009 at 9:24 pm

I’ve tried this already and when I click on Open and Repair it still tells me it can’t open because it’s corrupt….I’m out of ideas and I need to open this document!

sam said on : February 5th, 2009 at 4:04 pm

thanks that worked for me, my problem seemed to be a text box that had somehow gone wrong

Jemma said on : July 28th, 2009 at 5:27 am

Oh my goodness, thank you sooooo much for the easy instructions and helpful screenies.

I’m currently trying to write a novel, and with much horror I opened my little word document, and saw all these little [][][][][][] for pages and pages. I nearly had a heart attack!

This was REALLY helpful. I can’t thank you enough! Phew. My heart rate is back to normal!
Just one or two pages have those [][][][][] still left on it, but I can easily fill that back in again as I have a printed copy.

Thank you so much for the help. Eternally indebted!

Sana said on : August 17th, 2009 at 12:31 pm

thanks a lot for this help! I was really worried as my Word document was corrupted just after completion of my assignment. At first i was thinking to re-do but then i saw the method here and applied. It worked. I am really grateful!

MM said on : September 13th, 2009 at 1:02 am

Good tool for repairing Word docs! It works easy – thanks very much

bostonguy said on : October 23rd, 2009 at 8:14 am

Thank you!

Jawe said on : January 17th, 2010 at 11:48 pm

Hello friends,

Can somebody tell me that how can i recover my ms word corrupted files? those are very important to me and I need a way to recover them. If you know how, please tell me.

Jawed Iqbal

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