My wife creates massive proposals using Microsoft Word and Microsoft Office. Today she had a Word document spontaneously get corrupted and lose hours of her changes. The Microsoft Word document would not open at all, not on her computer, or any of her co-worker's computers.
I offered to take a look at the document and see if I could recover any part. She sent me the document and I started googling around for 'how to recover docx files and found a number of paid utilities claiming to fix the situation. Not ready to spend money, and on a whim, I tried to open the document with the Open Office, open source word processing software. Guess what, it worked!
The corrupted document opened just fine with Open Office. I easily saved the document as a .doc file which opened just fine on my wife's computer in Microsoft Office.
Since the file is now a .doc format and not a .docx format, some of the formatting was munged. However, fixing formatting is a whole lot easier than re-crafting pages and pages of text, don't you agree?
The best part about this, is it took less than a minute and $0 to repair the file.
Make sure and have Open Office installed. This is a free download and is very reputable software.
Start the Open Office program and choose Writer. The word processing software will open.
Use the File menu to open your corrupted file.
Look! There is your file. Yay!
Now use the file menu to save the document as a .doc file. See "Save As" image below.
A pop-up will appear asking if you really want to save using this format, press "Keep Current Format". See "Keep Current Format" image below.
Now, open your document using Microsoft Word again and you will have your file back.
Wasn't that easy? Open Source software is a blessing to all.
http://socrtwo.info/word_repair.htm - this page lists 13 free and freeware ways to recover Word doc files and 15 ways to recover docx ones for free. My free services at saveofficedata.com, is temporarily suspended. I may go back to hosting it for free...Also some of the software I listed at http://godskingsandheroes/software I recently made into shareware, but I might switch back again. The titles are however stil available on CNET for instancel for free.