Unable to Open MS Office File

While working on MS Office, we faces lots of problems and error sometime when you try to open an office file and it does not open but when you try the option Open With to open the file and file gets opened in other program rather than its respective program. For instance, an MS Word file might not open in MS Word and works effectively with any other program.

This situation generally occurs when the file type extension is incorrect. To resolve the problem, one must make sure to check and correct the file associations by repairing the Office program, or by using the regserver command.

Resolution

1. Repair the Office or Office Program: To repair the Office program follow these steps:

• First of all, close all running Office programs and turn off any running anti-virus program.
• Click the Start button and select the Run option.
• In the Run window, type the following command: appwiz.cpl. This would open the Add or Remove Programs window.
• Click the installed office program like, Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003 or Microsoft Office 2000 Professional etc.
• Now click the Change/Remove option. The Microsoft Office 2003 Setup window will be displayed.
• In the Setup window, select the Reinstall or Repair option. The program will now check for the installed files and will replace or install any files from the earlier version of Office which were of wrong size, damaged, corrupt or missing.
• The repairing of Office would make the program free from errors or any type of corruptions thus making the files accessible.
  

2. Use of regserver command to re-register the Office program:

The regserver command is used to re-register the Office program itself. This command is useful when you want to rewrite all the program registry keys and re-associate the programs with suitable program files. To perform this modification, follow these steps:

• Close the program which has to be re-registered
• Click the Start button and select the Run option.
• In the Run window, type program.exe/unregserver in the box.
• Again click Start and select the Run option and type program.exe/regserver in the box.
  

Note: This does not works for MS Outlook

These steps would re-register the Office program and the office files would open with their respective programs.

This article aims to provide you solution when you are unable to open MS word file or access its data because of unknown reasons. If in certain circumstances your MS Office file(s) gets corrupt or damaged you can recover your inaccessible data with the help of word recovery software. The word recovery software repairs the damaged file and makes it easy for you to access your data.