How to open a damaged Word document in WordPad
Microsoft Word documents have been observed exhibiting unusual behaviors. This happens when some information in the file is incorrect or damaged.
Damaged documents display strange behaviors such as frequent repagination, incorrect document layout and formatting, unreadable characters on the screen, error messages during processing, the computer stops responding when you load or view the file, or any other unusual behavior that is not a part of the program’s design.
There are no specific reasons for a document to go corrupt. A document can get corrupted or damaged due to various reasons like:
1) Hardware failure while working on the document.
2) Power failure while the document is open.
3) HTML content in the document.
4) Ifthe document was sent or received through an email, a virus could have damaged the file during internet traffic.
The best way to avoid issues with document damage or any other program is to keep regular backup copies of your stuffs. If you do not have a backup copy of your document, you can try to troubleshoot and recover a damaged Microsoft Word document.
One such measure to access corrupt documents is trying to open it with some other program. When you cannot open a damaged document in Word (typically because of damage in the file header), you can try to remove the damaged portions of the document by opening the document in WordPad and then saving the file as a Rich Text Format (RTF) file. When you save a file as an .rtf file in WordPad, any non-supported strings are squeezed out.
In order to perform this task, follow these steps:
1) Start Microsoft WordPad.
2) On the File menu, click Open.
3) In the Files of type box, click Word for Windows (*.doc).
4) Select the document that you want to recover and open it.
5) The Word document should now open.
6) On the File menu, click Save As.
7) In the File Name box, type a new file name with an .rtf file name extension.
8) In the Save as type box, click Rich Text Format (RTF). Save and Exit WordPad.
9) Restart Word, and then open the file that you saved in WordPad
10)On the File menu, click Save As.
11)Save the file in Word Document (.doc) format.
The file is now in Word for Windows format. Only the text from the document is retained and the file header is removed which means all graphics, fields, and formatting are lost. You can now reformat your new document and add any graphics, fields, and other formatting that your damaged document may have contained.
If the corruption retains and the document still exhibits errors or you could not open the file in WordPad as stated in step 4 earlier, the damage is higher than anticipated. If the word file does not open in plain text format then probably any troubleshooting method won;t help. You need a third party word recovery tool for such situations. They can successfully repair the damaged file and also recover all the formatting and graphics.
Recoveryfix for Word is excellent for Word recovery. It can extract all the text from corrupt word document including images, tables, comments,
and objects. It maintains the formatting after repair and the recovered file has the exact layout as the original file. It is capable of multiple document recovery simultaneously. The software can be used for MS word 2007 recovery to word 2010, 2007, 2003, 2002, 2000 version. You can try it with a fully functional free version but the evaluation version marks some content as [xxxx] instead of the real text.
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