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Free Ways to Recover
 Text and Maybe
Formatting From
Corrupt MS Word Files

Word error

Recovering Word
97-2003 DOC Documents

Those in bold type are quick fixes

  1. See my new exhaustive Blogger post for more ways beyond this list, to recover corrupt DOC and DOCX files.

  2. Check out Microsoft's own screenshot illustrated advice: How to troubleshoot damaged Word documents.

  3. Check out Tech Republic's 10+ ways to recover a corrupted Word document.

  4. Start up Winword with the slash a switch in the Search filed above the Start button.Try opening Word with the command line: winword.exe /a. This can be done from the Search field above the Start button in Vista and Windows 7. This causes Word to ignore the normal.dot (default template) file and default preferences (in the Registry). If there is a problem in the normal.dot or Registry, Word should open and perhaps your file will open normally, as well. - Via hafizullah@techrepublic.com post.

  5. Try changing the extension to docx (Word 2007-2010 format), docm (docx macro enabled format), dot (doc template), dotx (docx template) or dotm (docx macro enabled template) and try opening the file.

  6. Use the "Extract Text From Any Document" facility in Word. For some reason in Word 2007 and 2010, this facility doesn't seem to work as well as it used to. In the hopes that your file is actual a mislabeled doc file try other text extractors such as BinText, TextExtract or ReadText.

  7. Try to convert the text using a text/data extracting/converter service like: DOCX-Converter, Zamzar, Cometdocs, YouConvertIt, DocMorph, FreeFileConvert and probably others.

  8. Try the freeware Repair My Word. Note - this doesn't work with Word 2007 and 2010 format docx files.

  9. Try the open source command line app by SilverCoders' DocToText.

  10. Try opening the Word file in another Office Suite or Word Processor - Wikipedia's List of Office Suites and Wikipedia's List of Word Processors.

  11. Dave Taylor's innovative method for recovering Word document may only work with Word 97-2003 doc files.

  12. A long series of technical suggestions for recovering Word documents maybe not found elsewhere.

  13. Word stores its formatting including corrupt one in section breaks. One section break is hidden and is stored in the last paragraph marker. If you have entered no section breaks, try turning on the view paragraph marks/formatting feature in and copying the entire doc apart from before the last paragraph mark and pasting it into a document. You can also experiment with removing Section Breaks in Draft mode view, around text or objects which are not behaving well.

  14. There is also an obscure free Microsoft tool described in a white paper here: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=2096 and downloadable here: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=158791. It has an automatic repair feature that supposedly works for recovering some corrupt doc, xls and ppt files.
  15. https://online.officerecovery.com/ - Recoveronix' Online File Recovery. One of the oldest names in the business is offering a free recovery for users who go through a Demo recovery  but they have to wait 14 days for the full non-demo file link...
A piece of commercial software called WordFix, made by the company with which I have the best affiliate relationship, is often an effective tool for recovering corrupt Microsoft Word files of both the doc and docx varieties, when free methods fail. The demo version of the software is free.

Recovering Word
2007 and Later DOCX Documents

Those in bold type are quick fixes

  1. See my new exhaustive Blogger post for more ways beyond this list, to recover corrupt DOC and DOCX files.

  2. Check out Tech Republic's 10+ ways to recover a corrupted Word document.

  3. See my recent blog articles about manually recovering text and maybe formatting from corrupt docx files here and here. Most of the steps are automatically implemented by Savvy DOCX Word Recovery below.

  4. Try my open source/freeware: Savvy DOCX Word Recovery, Corrupt Office Extractor and/or Corrupt DOCX2TXT. Savvy DOCX Recovery sometimes recovers formatting as well as text. The latter two generally just recover text although you can try to repair the zip structure of the docx file with Corrupt Office Extractor.

  5. Try changing the extension to doc (Word 97-2003 format), docm (docx macro enabled format), dot (doc template), dotx (docx template) or dotm (docx macro enabled template).

  6. Use the "Extract Text From Any Document" facility in Word. For some reason in Word 2007 and 2010, this facility doesn't seem to work as well as it used to. In the hopes that your file is actual a mislabeled doc file try other text extractors such as BinText, TextExtract or ReadText.

  7. Try opening Word with the command line "winword.exe /a". This causes Word to ignore the normal.dot (default template) file and default preferences (in the Registry). If there is a problem in the normal.dot or Registry, Word should open and perhaps your file will open normally, as well.- Via hafizullah@techrepublic.com post.

  8. Use Microsoft's exhaustive methods: How to troubleshoot damaged documents in Word 2007 and in Word 2010.

  9. Using "Open and Repair" facilities in Word.

  10. Try to convert the text using a text/data extracting/converter service like: DOCX-Converter, Zamzar, Cometdocs, YouConvertIt, DocMorph, FreeFileConvert and probably others.

  11. Try the open source command line app SilverCoders' doctotext.

  12. Try the command line open source app by Sandeep Kumar, Docx to Text converter.

  13. Repair the zip aspect of the file with a free zip repair app and then try to open again in Word. Free zip repair programs: S2services' List of Zip Corruption Repair Specific Freeware and S2services' List of Zip Suites with Corruption Repair Features.

  14. Try opening the Word file in another Office Suite or Word Processor - Wikipedia's List of Office Suites and Wikipedia's List of Word Processors.

  15. Dave Taylor's innovative method for recovering Word document may only work with Word 97-2003 doc files, but I suppose it's worth trying.

  16. A long series of technical suggestions for recovering Word documents maybe not found elsewhere.
  17. Apparently the best advice about Word corruption is to install the latest Service Pack. Word 2007 is up to Service Pack 3. Word 2010 is up to Service Pack 2. There has not been a service pack released for Office 2013 yet. I'm not sure I understand it correctly but installing the latest service packs may be enough to fix corrupted documents. http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/office-service-packs.aspx
  18. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2528942 - Microsoft Mr. Fixit that is supposed to be fixed by Office 2010 SP1. If you are getting "The name in the end tag of the element must match the element type in the start tag." and your Word document has math formulas, this might fix it (or update to Office 2010 SP1).
  19. http://www.wordarticles.com/temp/Rebuilder.dotm  - this free Word Add-in will fix issues with some but maybe not all math papers experiencing the "end tag of the element must match the element type in the start tag error."
  20. http://runferalrun.wordpress.com/2012/08/31/the-name-in-the-end-tag-of-the-element-word-2010-error/ - instructions for manually fixing malformed XML from the word/document.xml subfile in the ODOCX.
  21. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2817583 - the hotfix relevant to users with "unspecified error Location: Part/word/document.xml, Line:2, Column: 0" errors that are using Word 2010. These are apparently sometimes or always papers with math formulas in them as well. The download button is up at the top of the page.
  22. http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=19544 - if you are on a Mac and as suggested by Bob Jones AKA: CyberTaz here, try using the Open XML converter to convert your document (I think) to a doc format.
  23. http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/office/forum/office_2010-word/i-got-an-error-saying-the-file-group-6-mini/5b553957-dae7-4fbd-b1f5-13606d9f035f - as you mentioned there are Word MVPs who are recovering corrupt Word files on request there. I recover Word files too but I charge $22 :-). There are probably other threads in Microsoft communities bulletin boards where free recovery is being offered, search here. I refund $17 if the recovery is unsuccessful and work usual with a 2-5 hour turnaround: http://saveofficedata.com/contact.htm.
  24. http://onlinerecovery.munsoft.com/ - they will let you recover 10 files for free if you mention their name and link from Facebook, Twitter or your blog. Their recovery algorithm works quite well.
  25. https://online.officerecovery.com/ - Recoveronix' Online File Recovery. One of the oldest names in the business is kindly offering a free recovery for users who go through a Demo recovery and then use the coupon code "S2SERVICES" (the name of my business :-) until Nov. 1, 2014. Often works.
Just to repeat, a piece of commercial software called WordFix, made by the company with which I have the best affiliate relationship, is often among the best tools for recovering corrupt Microsoft Word files of both the doc and docx varieties, when free methods fail. The demo version of the software is free.