Easy Way to Repair Corrupt MS Word Document

Documents don’t just hold vital importance to organizational environments but have also made it easier for educational institutions and home based users to document their data. Microsoft with its Word application has made it possible for users of all such groups to maintain data in documents. It is very important for these documents to remain in an intact state to be able to use the contents stored within. However, if you are being troubled then its integral structure is somehow compromised and needs to be checked. Nevertheless, not all conditions that prevent you from accessing your Word document mean corruption. This document discusses the stages of confirming corruption in a Word file. Moreover, you can also get to know how to repair corrupted MS Word document via the discussed workarounds.

 

Know For Sure If Your Document Is Corrupt

If you are being troubled by a Word document, there could be various reasons behind it. Not all issues with a file are caused by corruption, and listed below are a set of common behaviors reflected by an affected document:

• Pages of the document automatically get renumbered
• The document shows unrecognized set of characters
• Repeated occurrence of page breaks happen in the file
• The formatting or layout of the document gets fiddled with
• Word file shows up error messages on being accessed
• The machine keep on freezing or stops responding to the file

 

What Could Be The Cause?

These consequences are not always due to the damage of documents. Sometimes, the cause of such document behavior could be a bug with the origin application or so. In order to recover corrupted word file, know the cause by checking doc file or Word application.

1. To fix the issue, check other documents of the same type and confirm the behavior
2. Check other Microsoft Office applications for similar behavior

If the problem is not with the file then it is probably with the application, MS Word. Therefore, you will have to troubleshoot the entire application than going for a file repair.

However, if the problem is with the Word document then you need to follow troubleshooting steps for the file.

 

How to repair corrupted MS Word document?

Single File Repair: In order to repair corrupted word document (a single file), you can simply follow the built in repair option:

• Open a new (blank) Word file

 

• Go to File menu and select Open

 

• Browse and select the file that needs to be repaired

 

• On the Open button, click on the arrow to open the drop down list
• Choose Open and Repair option to open the file and proceed

 

NOTE: If the level of corruption is resolvable by Microsoft Word, it will be fixed and the document will be opened in a repaired form.

Create New File with Document Text: Another form of repairing a file is by inserting text from the previous document that was corrupt. In order to do so, you can follow the given steps:

• Open Word, go to File menu and click on New
• Select Blank document and on the extreme right bottom click on Create
• Go to the Insert tab and from the Object drop down select Text From File option
• Use the dialog box to browse the damaged file and click on Insert

NOTE: While repairing corrupted word document file if you are lucky enough and the text is extracted from the document that you were previously unable to access / open, you may still have to reformat it as the previous one is lost in the process.

 

Alternative Solution

If none of the given above procedures work, then yours is probably a case of severe document corruption. In such a case, you are suggested to go for a third party application instead. A third party tool such as Windows Data Recovery Software is capable of dealing with corruption of any intensity with flawless results guaranteed.

Conclusion: This blog explains the easiest way on how to repair corrupted MS Word document. Microsoft provides inbuilt feature i.e. Open and Repair for recovering corrupt or inaccessible Word file. Apart from this, if file is highly corrupted then one can use other methods also as mentioned above.