[lennybergman@]

Yesterday I was working on a very important Microsoft Word (2013) document, when it suddenly crashed. Upon trying to reopen the file Word said: “The file is corrupted and cannot be opened”. I have tried all of the other methods of restoring it, such as opening it in a different program, or opening it and choosing "open and repair" in MS Word.

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Hello,

Possible help below,

http://www.stellarin...-cannot-be-open

http://www.stellarin...r-word-file.php

[zep516]

Hello,

Possible help below,

http://www.stellarin...-cannot-be-open

http://www.stellarin...r-word-file.php

[sylvia41852]

Hi,leenybergman,

 

When a Word document file is corrupted, then you can try several methods to recover it:

1. First of all, you can try the recovery function integrated with Microsoft Word, as u had tryed.

2. Second, you may also try OpenOffice to open and repair the corrupted document. OpenOffice is a free and open source software which is compatible with Word document. Sometimes it can open the corrupt document that Word cannot open.

You can get OpenOffice at http://www.openoffice.org/

3. For docx files, they are actually a group of files compressed in Zip file format. Therefore, sometimes, if the corruption is only caused by the Zip file, then you can use Zip repair tools such as WinRAR at http://www.rarlab.comto repair the file, as follows:

3.1 Assuming the corrupt Word file is a.docx, then you need to rename it to a.zip
3.2 Start WinRAR, go to "Tools > Repair Archive" to repair a.zip and generated a fixed file a_fixed.zip.
3.3 Rename a_fixed.zip back to a_fixed.docx
3.4 Using Excel to open a_fixed.docx.

There may still be some warnings when opening the fixed file in Word, just let ignore it and Word will try to open and repair the fixed file. If the file can be opened successfully, then you can just save the contents into another error-free file.

4. If 1, 2, 3  does not work, then you may try third-party tools
Good luck!