"Word found unreadable content" through OneDrive on my iPad. Is there anything I can do?

Question

On my iPad, I am trying to use my OneDrive account from school to work on papers. I have a Windows laptop and iPad I like to bounce between, so OneDrive and the iPad Files app have worked great so far with that. However, every time I save a Word doc, I cannot open it in any app because I get this message:

"Word found unreadable content in "Paper". Do you want to recover the contents of this document? If you trust the source of this document, click Yes."

Then I have to save a new, renamed copy of it every time I open it, with on my Windows laptop iPad. The internet has not been helpful so far. Any ideas?

Answer 1

Hi @Stephen Waggoner,

To resolve this issue, you can try the following steps:

1. Following the steps in the Workaround 2 and 3 sections of this article: You receive an error message when you try to open an Office document.
2. If the issue persists, try to open the file on your Windows laptop and save it again as a Word document. Then, upload the new file to OneDrive and try to open it on your iPad.
3. If the issue still persists, try to download a copy of the file from OneDrive to your iPad and open it in a different app that supports Word documents.

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Answer 2

Hi @Stephen Waggoner,

Does this issue happen to all Word files and some specific files? If it happens to some specific files, I think those files may be broken. You can try repairing the files. See this thread for more information: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/word-found-unreadable-content-if-you-trust-the/b5d8c1d9-3470-447c-8253-77e190516ead.

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