How in the Tech

Recovering a damaged or corrupted Word document

By Adam Myers ⋅ April 5, 2010 ⋅ Tags: Microsoft Word

If you’ve used Microsoft Word enough in your lifetime you’ve likely encountered a document that was fine yesterday only to find out today it’s completely trashed. Word documents, more than any other binary file type in my experience, have a propensity to become corrupt and generally unreadable to the user. Rarely can the cause of the corruption be identified but some theorize that modifying the  document with many different versions of Word, even though they are all supposedly compatible, uncovers the potential problem. This theory carries some weight because different versions of Word often handle a corrupt document in different manners. For example, a corrupt document may cause one version of Word to crash open opening of it, while another will display a mixture of text and binary characters. Nevertheless, the contents of the document are not easily usable which, needless to say, can be quite devastating if the document is of any importance and the backup is non-existent.

In such situations of damaged and corrupted documents, the user has just a few options. One option is to attempt to recover portions of the text contained in the document by opening it in Notepad. This process is often tedious because you are forced to filter through portions of garbage to pull out the relevant bits. Secondarily, this is not something recommended for lengthy documents – again, because of the extra cruft contained in a typical Word document must be parsed.

Another option is leveraging the free Windows application Damaged-DOCX2TXT. At it’s simplest explanation, Damaged-DOCX2TXT somewhat automates the process a user would be forced to undertake using the Notepad situation above. The interface is spartan with just a typical File->Open where you pass the file that you want recovered. After processing, and I should mention the program itself is rather sluggish in it’s execution – just remain patient, you are presented with just the text of your document – sans formatting and fonts unfortunately. With the plain-text in hand, it can be copy and pasted into Word where all the extra flair can be reapplied.

While Damaged-DOCX2TXT isn’t a miracle worker, sometimes the recovering of the actual text content is sufficient when previously you felt all was lost. One other limitation of the portable software is it’s requirement that the initial Word document be in the Word 2007+ .docx file type. However, the software is free and saving your bacon just once is all it will take for it to gain your appreciation.

Download Damaged-DOCX2TXT