How to Recover Corrupt Microsoft Office Word Document

November 24, 2007 · Filed Under How To and Online Tutorials · 1 Comment 

How to Recover Corrupt Microsoft Office Word Document

A corrupted Microsoft Office file, be it Word, Powerpoint, Excel, Access, or Infopath is when you attempt to open the document and it contains garbage characters. Some well known errors such as, “Word cannot open the document.” or “Word cannot recognize the document format.” is a pain in the ass, all those effort when down the drain, things are made worth if you find yourself without a secondary backup file.

Method 1. Use the build in Recovery and Repair tool

How to Recover Corrupt Microsoft Office Work Document

All version of Microsoft Office has an extensive Auto Repair and Recovery tool built into it, this option allows the user to recover their corrupted Microsoft Office file in the event of failure or human error. However, this recovery tool is no perfect, like all Microsoft product, the detect and repair tool is a fairly basic engine, not powerful enough in case of a critical error.

Method 2. Use a 3rd party Recovery Tool for Corrupt Microsoft Office Files

Ontrack’s EasyRecovery FileRepair
Office Recovery
Doc Repair - Recover your corrupted Microsoft Word document
Kernel Word Recovery Software- Repair Corrupt Word Document [DOC] Files
Repair My Word

Download these third party Microsoft Office Word recovery tools for a small fee, they are worth every penny, believe me. Please take note that these software does not comes with serial, crack, keygen. It is recommended that the user purchase the end product for the maximum output of file recovery.

These recovery tools will allow you to obtain access to the contents of corrupt word documents. It will repair Microsoft Word 6.0, Word 95, 97, 2000, XP, and 2003 for Windows. It is simple to use. Just open the corrupt Word file, preview the recoverable text in the preview window and save this text to a new error free Word file. The demo version will do the trick.

Method 3. Recover Microsoft Office Files from Temporary File

How to Recover Corrupt Microsoft Office Word Document

Another method is to locate the temporary file of the original file, usually the file hidden and stored on the same folder as the original. Enable ‘view all files’ in the “tools” -> “Folder Options” -> “View”. Enable View hidden files and locate the hidden Microsoft Office file.

This temporary file will have a few different letters after the tilde (or squiggly line “ ~”) . These are good ones to look for to find some lost info:

  • A word document file will look like ~wrdxxxx.tmp
  • A temp document file will look like ~wrfxxxx.tmp
  • An auto recovery file will look like ~wraxxxx.tmp

Copy the file to a designated folder and rename the file extension from .tmp to .doc

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