How to repair damaged MS Word 2010 document that won't open

Corruption in Word documents is a common problem. Sometime you can't even open your documents due to high level of corruption. In such case, you can try free methods provided by Microsoft to repair your corrupt documents. If one method fails to repair corrupt file then try another.

Method 1: Try to open the document in draft mode
  1. Open Word, Go to View tab-> Document Views group-> Draft.
  2. Now go to File-> Options-> Display document content.
  3. Go to Advanced option for working with Word and click Draft font and Picture Placeholders checkbox.
  4. Now Go to General section-> Advanced option for working with Word and uncheck the Update automatic link at Open.
  5. If you can open your document then save it in * .rtf format using File-> Save As option.
  6. Now close the document and reopen it.
  7. Save the file back to Word format and give it a different name.
  8. Now repair the document using 'Open & Repair' method.
  9. If problem still persist then try next method.
Method 2: Insert the corrupt document in a new blank document
  1. Open Word-> File-> New-> Blank document-> Create.
  2. Now go to Insert tab-> Insert Object and click Text from file.
  3. A Insert File dialog box will open, select your corrupt file and click Insert.
Method 3: Create Link
  1. Open Word-> File-> New-> Blank document-> Create.
  2. Type anything in the document and Save.
  3. Now copy the text that that you have typed by clicking on Copy in the Clipboard group.
  4. Open a new blank document and again go to Clipboard group-> Click the Paste Special by clicking the arrow on the Paste button.
  5. Now click Paste link-> Formatted Text and Ok.
  6. Right click the linked text-> Linked Document Object-> Links.
  7. Select Linked document in the Links dialog box and click Change Source.
  8. Now select the document that you can't open and click Open.
  9. Again Right click the linked text-> Linked Document Object-> Links> Break Link.
  10. Click Yes on the message “Are you want to break the selected links?”
Method 4: Use converter
  1. Open Word-> File-> Open.
  2. Click 'Recover Text from Any File(* . *) from the Files of type box.
  3. Select the damaged document and click Open.
Note: The recovered document will contain only text, no formatting.

If unfortunately all above methods fail to repair your damaged document then try a good third party Word repair tool.



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