How to recover a corrupt Office document

Recovering corrupt documents

Who has never experienced this painful experience that is to get back to open a Microsoft Office file, a message notifying you that your file is corrupted? We've compiled some solutions for you, the basic to the most advanced, through basic rules.

Solution 1: The automatic backup, an obvious precaution

This may seem surprising, but the first solution to recover an Office document ... is not to lose! For this, the following Microsoft has a strong practical module, the automatic backup. To activate it, is simple.

Here are the steps in Word:
1. In the main menu symbolized by the Office logo, click on the bottom right on "Word Options";
2. In the "Record", select the "Save AutoRecover information.
3. You can choose your own frequency of these backups indicating an interval between two records, and the location of these files recovery.

Solution 2: Check your version of Microsoft Office

One of the most often encountered with Office documents is the difference between the version of the suite used to create the document and used to read it. If the 2007 version, for example, will have no problem reading a 2003 Office document, the converse is not true. This is the famous difference between the documents. Doc, for the 2003 version, and the extension. Docx for the latest version of the Office suite. There is a simple solution to this problem, the Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack.

1. Get the Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack in our software and install it.
2. Therefore, you can open the document. Docx (or xlsx) with your version of Office 2003 without concern.

Option 3: Use the Recovery Office

Like the two previous ones, this solution is delivered by Microsoft itself. Indeed, the software suite Office all have a somewhat unknown, but which can sometimes make a lot. To use the recovery tool in Word for example, do the following (always for Word):

1. Start Word, via a shortcut or a document that works, whatever. 2. Via the main menu (the Office logo), select "Open". Locate and select the file that you do more to open.
3. Open the menu of "Open" button at the bottom of the window and select "Open and Repair."

If all goes well, your document will appear before your eyes in awe.Otherwise, you can always try the following:

1. Via the main menu (the Office logo), select "Open".
2. In the menu "Every Word documents," select "Get text from any file".

You will, however a good chance of getting your text using this method which could only make you lose the benefit of your layout.

Solution 4: Using OpenOffice.org or Wordpad

If Word or another Office program can not reach, despite previous attempts to open your document is still the possibility of using other software. The easiest way is to seek to Wordpad, the word processing document, and OpenOffice.org in all other cases. This trick somewhat resembles the method of recovery of plain text that Word is capable of.

1. Open Wordpad using the shortcut Windows key + R, then typing "wordpad" in the "Open".
2. From the File menu, choose the "Open". Locate and select the file to recover.

Some characters may appear here and there, but your text should hide in this window. The layout is too lost, but the chances of recovering the text are quite large. For OpenOffice.org, the method is completely similar and should give the same results.

Step 5: The software

If these solutions which we will call simply failed, then your file is really badly damaged. All is not lost however, as there are specialized software, you can find in our library. Thus, WordFIX, WordRecovery, WordFIX Data Recovery, etc and other DOC Regenerator may give better results than our previous solutions.

Apart from these programs completely dedicated to the Office suite (Word even exclusively), there are powerful solutions to recover files that include specific modules to documents from the rest of Microsoft.