Unfortunately, documents created in the Word text editor, which is included in any office suite, regardless of the year of development and release, are subject to damage to the greatest degree among all Office files. And far from always the automated tools built into this editor allow you to restore the necessary documents. It happens, after all, that the file does not even open, neither from the "Explorer", nor through the file menu of the program itself. What can be done to repair a damaged Word file? To do this, you can use several universal solutions, which are further proposed to be considered in full.
Problems Corrupted Word Text Documents
To begin, let's decide why documents of these formats are so often damaged. This is not only a matter of an office editor, which for some reason has the ability to “fly out” or “hang” at the most inopportune moment. Sometimes the root cause can be all kinds of viruses that well just love user files of this type. But they often contain important or confidential data, since it seems doubtful that an ordinary user or even a trained experienced office clerk will save such data in text files, not to mention all kinds of cloud services or programs for managing passwords with special containers in which all information is stored in encrypted form. But usually, alas, it is Word that crashes.
How to recover a damaged Word document in automatic mode?
As a rule, after an emergency shutdown, when you restart it, the text editor independently determines that some file was closed. If you are prompted to recover a damaged Word file , you can only restore it if it was originally saved and automatic saving was turned on.
The autosave interval set by default in the application does not suit many, therefore, in order to protect yourself from possible negative consequences, it is better to immediately change it by setting a minimum interval (1 minute). In this case, with automatic recovery, you can count on at least some result.
File recovery when opening documents
But what if the Word file is damaged to such an extent that it doesn’t even open from the "Explorer", and from the side of the program the reaction to it is zero? Do not rush to use all kinds of additional third-party programs for now, but try another, no less interesting recovery tool, which is available in the main editor kit.
In this case, we are talking about opening a damaged Word file using the file menu, but not with the choice of a document that can be shown in the history, indicating its location when using the browse function. After selecting a file in the drop-down list of the open button, select the "Open and Restore" item. It is possible that this will give the desired result. But what to do if the document cannot be brought to life by any of the above proposed methods? To do this, you will have to resort to the help of additional funds.
What is Recovery Toolbox for Word?
Today, a number of programs have been developed for the rapid resuscitation of office documents (and not only them). However, not all of them are equivalent to each other, and some generally fail when the files are deeply damaged, either reporting impossibility to restore, or giving similar errors.
The program for recovering damaged Word files described below, according to the vast majority of specialists, experts, and users who have put it into practice, is not only one of the most powerful and effective when other applications cannot cope with the task assigned to them, but also as simple as possible use. True, some functions in it are available only for registered users. Using it, recovering a damaged Word file is easy.
The main lines of action
There is nothing supernatural in using this application. The procedure used to quickly restore the desired document is as follows:
- download and install the program (it will take a couple of minutes on the strength);
- select the required file with the browse button or enter its name in the field specially designed for this;
- press the start button of the analysis;
- accept the offer to begin the recovery process;
- View the scanned text
- If everything suits you, click the restore button, choosing from the proposed options either export to Word or convert to a text file and wait for the process to complete.
Saving and exporting recovered data
And here the main problems begin. The fact is that you cannot restore the damaged Word file and export immediately to the original format, because the application will immediately give a notification that the program needs to be bought.
In the best case, if the source document contained only text without formatting or additional inserts like graphic objects, elements of the WordArt collection or something similar, the contents can be saved as a text document, then copy it when you open the file in the same Notepad and paste into the editor. But even in this case, the requirement to officially purchase a software product may follow. In such a situation, you will have to buy an activation key or download a hacked version. If you have an official release installed with all the available functions, you only need to set a new name for the saved document and specify the encoding. Again, note that even when exporting to the Word editor, formatting will be lost, and the text will be inserted in the form shown in the analysis result window.
Last Tips
Based on the foregoing, we can safely say that the use of specialized third-party tools for recovering Word documents, unless damage has reached an extreme degree, is not always justified, since in practice the editor’s tools work quite efficiently. But in the case when no actions help, one cannot do without such utilities. Of course, the program described above is certainly one of the best in its class, but buying it many people is baffled, despite the fact that it recovers any documents and with any damage literally within a couple of minutes. But there is a loophole here, which the creators of the application either did not take care of or forgot.
To get around the restrictions, select all the text in the scan results window using the combination Ctrl + A, copy the contents to the clipboard (Ctrl + C), and then paste them either into Notepad, Word, or any other text editor!