Different ways to recover a corrupted Word document

If you’ve ever had an important document get corrupted, you know the desolation that sets in. You’ve lost important information and/or countless hours of work - or so it appears. But hang on: You may not have to accept data loss. Here are some things that you can try when you’re dealing with a corrupted Word (doc) document.

Don’t assume that the document is corrupt.

Automatically assuming that a document is corrupt can be a big mistake. It could be Word or even Windows that is having the problem. Before you start trying to restore a backup or to repair a file, try opening other documents. Try opening your “corrupt” document on another computer.

Make a copy of the document

This isn’t really a recovery trick, but it is a fundamental preliminary step. If you don’t have a backup copy of the corrupt document, make a copy of the corrupted file right away and store it on removable media. There’s a chance that the corruption within the file could become worse over time or that you could destroy the file while trying to recover it. Making a backup copy of the file now may save you even more distress later on.

Check your email

In numerous cases, when you have emailed a copy of the document to someone at some point. If so, a copy of the document may still be in Outlook’s Sent Items folder, attached to the email message you sent. Try selecting the Sent Items folder and using Outlook’s Search feature to look for the document’s name.

Run CHKDSK

Try running CHKDSK against the volume containing the corrupted word file. CHKDSK may be able to fix those problems which are caused due to corruption at the file system level.

Try exporting the file

Sometimes, try to save the word file in an alternate format such as RTF or TXT will cause some of Word’s codes to be stripped from the document, which often fixes the problem.

Extract the raw text

Although saving the Word document as an RTF or TXT file usually works pretty well, that technique does you no good if Word won’t open the file. One approach is to use another word processor that supports Word documents. Alternatively, you can use a file editor to manually extract anything salvageable from the file.

Use Word’s text converter

You may also able to recover the text portion of a document using Word’s text converter. Click File then select Open. When Open dialog box appears, select the corrupted word document. Then, choose recover text from any file from the Files of Type drop-down list and open the document. This filter will import straight ASCII text from any file. You will lose Word formatting and nontext items such as graphics, but you should at least be able to extract most of the text information. Note that this method is limited to documents in the Word 97-2003 format.

Use Open and Repair

Word XP and later offer an Open and Repair option, which you can use to recover word document. Just select the file and choose Open and Repair from the Open drop-down list in the bottom-right corner. This isn’t foolproof, but it does work on a lot of problematical documents.

Use a Vista shadow copy of the document

Windows Vista automatically saves shadow copies of some files to the hard drive. If a shadow copy of your document exists, it may be possible to recover a recent version of the document. To do so, just right-click on the document and select the Properties command from the shortcut menu. When the document’s properties sheet appears, select the Previous Versions tab (This tab exists only for files stored on NTFS volumes). The Previous Versions tab will show you previous versions of the file that are available and then use that shadow copy.

Restore the file header

Although every Word document is different, Word documents that are created by a common version of Word have a common file header but I can’t tell you exactly what this header contains. Once you have determined which part of the file is the header, you can copy the header bits from a well-known good document and use the editor to paste those bits into your corrupt document, overwriting the existing header in the process. If the header was the portion of the document that was damaged, this technique will fix the problem.

Use a recovery program

Several third-party applications on the market are designed to recover and repair word documents. One of the best known products is Stellar Phoenix word recovery.