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How to Recover Text from a Corrupted Word Document

Roy Ulerio
Roy Ulerio

Updated:

When attempted to open a damaged Word document, you might come across the corruption error message like "Word experienced an error trying to open the file", "Incorrect document layout and formatting", "Unreadable characters on the screen", etc. Guess you want a secure way to repair/recover text from a damaged Word document. This article contains step-by-step methods that may help you partly or fully restore your document.

Method 1: Open and repair damaged Word document

If you can open the damaged document, use the followings steps to force Word to repair a damaged file.

Step 1: On the File tab, click Open > Browser. In the Open dialog box, select the corrupted file that you want to open.

Step 2: Click the arrow on the Open button, and then click Open and Repair.

Repair the corrupt Word docunment

Step 3: Confirm that repairing the document can solve the problem. Verify that the strange behavior no longer occurs. If the strange behavior persists, restart Windows, and then go to method 3.

Method 2: Open the file with the text recovery converter

If the damaged document does not open, you may receive one of the following error messages: "This file cannot be opened by using Microsoft Word. Do you want to search the Microsoft Office Online Web site for a converter that can open the file?" To resolve this issue, you can try to the Microsoft Download Center to download and install the OOXML Strict Converter for Office 2010 and then continue the following steps:

Wore cannot open the document

Step 1: Open Word, then click File > Open. Next, click Browse.

Step 2: Navigate to the file you’re trying to open. When you get to the file, select the "Recover Text from Any File (*.*)" file type from the dropdown menu.

Recovey Text from any file

After the document is recovered by using the "Recover Text from Any File" converter, there is some binary data text that is not converted. You can delete this binary data text before you save the file as a Word document.

Method 3: Repair a corrupted Word file with iSumsoft Word Refixer

If one of above method is not successful, you can try this solutions for a quick fix. iSumsoft Word Refixe is an advanced tool that is designed to repair corrupted or damaged Word DOC and DOCX files.

Free Trial

Step 1: Install the Word Refixer tool on your computer and then launch it.

Step 2: Click on Add File button to select the corrupt or damaged MS Word document.

Select file

This program will automatically repair corrupted and damaged files.

Repair damaged Word file

Step 3: When done, you will see a prompt saying "The file is restored". Click OK.

corrupted Word file restored

Step 4: Click Save to save the repaired word files to a safe location.

Step 5: Then you can open the repaired Word file to if you text recovered fully.

Final words

Microsoft Office tools lack the skills to solve file corruption and damage problems. In this case, the third-party software application iSumsoft Word Refixer is the best solution, because it can recover damaged Word files with high success rate.