4 Free Tools To Repair And Recover Corrupt Microsoft Office Word Doc DocX Documents

How to get corrupted doc files back? 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 that effort when down the drain, things are made worthless if you find yourself without a secondary backup file. Fear not, recovering lost word documents and repairing damaged docx files has never been easier. Here are 4 amazing free tools that recover, repair and restore corrupt Microsoft Office Word doc and docx.

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1. Microsoft Word Open and Repair

Microsoft Word automatically uses the Open and Repair feature if Word detects a problem with a document when you open it. However, you can force Word to use the Open and Repair feature when you open any document. This may be especially useful when you intend to save the document in a different file format.

If you save a damaged document in a different file format, you may not be able to open the saved document. For more information about how to troubleshoot damaged Word documents, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

2. S2 Recovery Tools for Microsoft Word

Microsoft recommends methods for recovering corrupt Word files that won’t open. This software provides buttons to easily invoke these as well as providing 5 independent methods for recovering and opening corrupt Microsoft Word DOC & DOCX files. Additionally the program provides links to two pieces of freeware not coded by the author, a free service (if you can wait 14 days!) and a featured commercial solution (which is an affiliate of the author’s).

Also it has its own native previous file version recovery tool which works in any version of Windows, Vista-Windows 10 if System Protection has been turned on in the System App of the Control Panel and a Restore Point made. Another feature is a GUI interface for finding temporary, deleted and lost versions of corrupt files. Future plans are to implement Microsoft’s instructions for recovering corrupt Word files that will open. This program was formerly known as Word Recovery and more recently S2 Services Word Recovery. Works great on Microsoft Windows 10.

3. Repair My Word

Repair My Word is a data recovery program for Microsoft Word documents. It is designed to recover text from damaged or corrupt Word files (.doc files) that will not open normally. The recovered text can then be saved as an error free Microsoft Word document. Repair My Word 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. Repairing My Word 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. This program does NOT work for Office 2007 .docx files. Some common error messages which can prevent a user opening a Microsoft Word document include:

• “The document name or path is not valid. Try these suggestions. Check the file permissions for the document or drive. Use the File Open dialog box to locate the document.”
• “Word cannot open the document.”
• “Word cannot open the document: user does not have access privileges.”
• When you attempt to open a Microsoft Word 97 document into Microsoft Word version 6.x or 7.x, the document contains garbage characters.

4. Savvy DOCX Recovery

XML was designed from the beginning to be intolerant of errors. This decision adversely affects MS Word’s corruption recovery. With one error in the document.xml subfile where all the DOCX file’s text is stored, instead of a partial recovery, Word will stop and throw an error.

Savvy DOCX Recovery attempts to do precise surgery on corrupt Word documents to reorder or excise bad XML tags. If this doesn’t work, it uses the command line app xmllint first to attempt to repair corrupt XML subfiles of the DOCX. If this doesn’t work a second attempt is made where the corrupt XML subfiles are truncated at the first error, and the correct ending tags are again added with xmllint.

Recover Microsoft Office Files from Temporary File

Another method is to locate the temporary file of the original file, usually the file hidden and stored in 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. Copy the file to a designated folder and rename the file extension from .tmp to .doc

• 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