Fix Corrupt Word Documents

If Microsoft Word crashes while you’re typing an important paper or if you try to open an existing document and receive an error, you probably have a corrupt Word doc. If you’re working in a Word document and you begin to notice you can no longer cut and paste, change fonts or even type, then you know the document is probably corrupted. You should attempt to salvage whatever data you can before closing it. Once you close out, you may discover that same document will no longer open. It doesn’t matter how or why it happened, but you can attempt to repair it by trying the following:

Open the Word program. Go to File, then Open and navigate to the corrupt Word document. If you’re in Word 2007, click the Microsoft icon in the upper-left corner, then select Open. Highlight the document by clicking on it once. In the lower right-hand corner, you’ll notice the Open button has a small arrow on the side. Click that to expose more options. One of those will be Open and Repair. If you are able to get the Word document to open, see if you can copy the text and open a new, blank document and paste it in there. Creating a new document might prevent it from crashing again.

In an effort to prevent the loss of data, you should consider rebooting the computer before beginning a big project, try not to multitask and have a reliable backup by occasionally selecting Save As and naming the document something different.