How to repair a MS Word document on OpenOffice

[jmcconville]

Yesterday I was working on a very important Microsoft Word (2008) document, when it suddenly crashed. Upon trying to reopen the file MS said that the file was corrupted. 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.

A friend suggested that I download OpenOffice in order to repair this file. Any suggestions on how I would go about doing that?? Simply trying to open the document via OpenOffice did not work. ahhhh this is going to drive me crazy!! Any advice or tips is greatly appreciated!!

[squenson]

Welcome to this forum jmcconville!

I am afraid that if OpenOffice cannot open the document, there is not much you and we can do. I suggest another approach, to open the document with an hexdecimal editor and see whether there are portions of text which can eventually be copied. It will be a tedious work and of course all the formatting will be lost.

[RoryOF]

One other option, but it may be too late for that depending on the use the computer has had in the meantime, is to use a file recovery program (Photorec is often recommended). This may recover an earlier version. The earlier such a utilty is applied the better the chances of finding something.

[keme]

In some cases Writer will manage to recover a corrupted document that MS Office will refuse to open. There is no special procedure to do this. You just try to open your file. You already did that and determined that it doesn't help.

In my experience, Word's "Recover text from any file" input filter (chosen by "file type" in the open dialog) has a better recovery record than Writer. With that you only get plain text, no formatting and no graphics, similar to the hex editor that squenson suggested. The filter will strip off everything that it cannot interpret as a printable character, so it's not quite as "nitty gritty" as squenson's suggestion, but with nearly the same chance of success (and a lot easier to do the necessary cleanup).

[kiddie]

Yesterday I was working on a very important Microsoft Word (2008) document, when it suddenly crashed. Upon trying to reopen the file MS said that the file was corrupted. 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.

A friend suggested that I download OpenOffice in order to repair this file. Any suggestions on how I would go about doing that?? Simply trying to open the document via OpenOffice did not work. ahhhh this is going to drive me crazy!! Any advice or tips is greatly appreciated!!

I don't know who asked you to download OpenOffice.org to repair corrupt file. OpenOffice.org is not a file recovery software. It is just similar to MS Office. I have been using OpenOffice.org for a long time, but never came to know about this fact (not actually since it's a myth). It supports MS Office files and also it may open the files which are not opening in MS Office. But, it doesn't mean this that it has a repair or recovery engine. To repair corrupt files you must go for a third-party software since you have already tried Open and Repair or tried to open the document in different programs. Find a data or file recovery software on Google or consult some expert.
I can personally recommend you to check demo version of sysinfotools ms word docx recovery software. It's freely available. It will recover data from your corrupt file. I have used it a couple of times.

[johnarnulf]

To recover deleted data from MS word files or documents, I suggest an excellent or effective software, you can use Kernel for Word Repair Tool. It can quickly and easily recover and repair accidentally deleted, virus affected or unexpected system shutdown, media read error and etc. You can use wordfilerecovery.com is software.

[keme]

To recover deleted data from MS word files or documents, I suggest an excellent or effective software, you can use Kernel for Word Repair Tool. It can quickly and easily recover and repair accidentally deleted, virus affected or unexpected system shutdown, media read error and etc. You can use wordfilerecovery.com is software.

... which is only available for Windows, so it is of little use on the OS-X platform.

[bettie]

MS Word gets corrupted very easily due to virus attacks thus, making the data inaccessible. You must have heard of "open and repair" function of Word application. Use this to recover word docx file. You will get the steps from internet or you can search this post - Repair Word Document and Prevent it from Getting Damaged || Bela N Blog.

[Isco]

I had the same problem this week in Word 2010. The best option was to repair the word file in Windows 7 and Office 2007.
First, I downloaded a tool called WordFIX.
Second, I use the recovery tool and I saw the results on the preview of the software.
Third, I save the data in a new file.
Fourth, I converted the word file 2007 to 2010.
Pass the file from Word to OpenOffice it does not work for me.

[kiddie]

There are few manual tricks to repair Word files, one should try them once. The manual tricks don't require any paid software or any other cost. I can share a blog post here in which you can find the manual tricks and detailed information: Repair Word Document by using 4 Easy Manual Tricks | N. Sem's Blog

Don't use any paid utility when you can repair Word files manually.

Thanks and best regards.