MSWords DOCX corrupted: What is the BEST recovery tool out there?

If you send me a copy of the documents, referencing this thread in the covering email message, I will investigate the issue.

The idea of opening a damaged .docx file in Notepad -- if it won't open in Word -- often won't work at all. It depends on exactly what is damaged.

A .docx file is actually a .zip file whose extension has been changed. It contains several folders and a variable number of files inside those folders. A .zip file is by definition a compressed container, and it has a table of data that's required to decompress it. If the damage is in that table, there is no way to decompress the rest of the file. As the doctor said on Star Trek, "It's dead, Jim."

If you use File Explorer to change the extension of the document from .docx to .zip, double-click it, and it opens, then the .zip decompression is OK. Then you can open the folder inside it named "word", and open the file named document.xml in Notepad or another text editor. You can recover the text from there after deleting the XML tags.

If the damaged file is a .doc file instead of .docx, you can indeed open the .doc file in Notepad. There will be a bunch of unreadable stuff at the beginning -- that's all the binary formatting information -- followed by plain text that you can recover.

Thank you both.

I will try this tomorrow, as it is 03.00H ... .

Have a splendid day.

Hi Ben R,

Please make a copy of the file and try the steps on these links -->

Open a document after a file corruption error https://support.microsoft.com/help/47df9d48-2165-4411-a699-1786ac734bc3

How to troubleshoot damaged documents in Word https://learn.microsoft.com/office/troubleshoot/word/damaged-documents-in-word

Let us know how that goes and if you have any further questions. -Amit

Hi,

I am writing in response to your question about recovering old DOCX files. There are a few possible methods you can try, depending on the cause of the corruption.

One option is to use the Open and Repair feature in Microsoft Word. To do this, open Word and click on File > Open. Then, browse to the location of the corrupted file and select it. Instead of clicking on Open, click on the arrow next to it and choose Open and Repair. This will attempt to fix any errors in the file and open it.

Another option is to use a third-party recovery tool. These are software applications that can scan and repair corrupted DOCX files. You can download them from their respective websites and follow the instructions to use them.

A third option is to try to extract the text from the corrupted file using a text editor, such as Notepad or Notepad++. To do this, right-click on the corrupted file and choose Open with > Notepad or Notepad++. This will open the file as a plain text document, which may contain some unreadable characters and codes. You can try to copy and paste the text that you can recognize into a new Word document and save it.

I hope this helps you recover your old DOCX files.

Sincerely,

Junyu Satoh