Corrupted Word doc - how to fix?

O

Ook

I have a Word document. When I open it, it tells me that "a table in this
document has become corrupt....". The it crashes with an exception
0x000001ac. It will not let me load this document. This is an important
document, and my backup is several days old. Is there anything I can do to
recover this document so that I don't have to redo the work I've done in the
last few days. I'm using Office XP.
 
M

macropod

Hi Ook,

Try Opening it with WordPad or, failing that, NotePad. You should at least
be able to recover the text, though the table(s) might be history.

Another option may be to use create a new document then use Insert|File to
import the corrupt one's contents into a new document. If this works (and
there's no guarantee it will), select the imported material, the press
Ctrl-Shift_F9 to break the link.Then convert all tables to text & back
again.

Cheers
 
M

macropod

He Beth,

New feature in Word XP? I use Word 2000, which doesn't have the "Open and
Repair" option.

Cheers
 
B

Beth Melton

Yep. It's included in Word 2003 as well.

I've used it on several documents that wouldn't open and Word was able
to open and repair them.

It generates a list of errors corrected along with a "Go to" dialog
box so you can navigate to the corrections.

It's really too bad the command isn't more discoverable. I suspect
many do not know it is there and I know I tend to forget about it
occasionally. :)
--
Please post all follow-up questions to the newsgroup. Requests for
assistance by email can not be acknowledged.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Beth Melton
Microsoft Office MVP

Word FAQ: http://mvps.org/word
TechTrax eZine: http://mousetrax.com/techtrax/
MVP FAQ site: http://mvps.org/
 
O

Ook

I was able to open it with Word2000. There is one spot that crashes, but I
think I can copy the uncorrupted portions into a clean Word doc. "Repairing"
it removes tables, and replaces them with text. It makes such a mess out of
it that it is easier for me to take a version from several days ago that is
not corrupt and use that.

I wonder why Word2000 would open it, while WordXP crashed?
 
B

Beth Melton

I suspect it was unstable in Word 2000. I've encountered a few corrupt
documents I was unable to open in Word 2002/2003 but could open them
in Word 97/2000.

However open was about all you could do with them. They would crash
when using Print, Find, Save As, AutoRecovery save, etc.

If you select the text that was formerly a table and use the
Table/Convert/Text to Table you might be surprised at how well it
converts in to a table. It's worth a try anyway.
--
Please post all follow-up questions to the newsgroup. Requests for
assistance by email can not be acknowledged.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Beth Melton
Microsoft Office MVP

Word FAQ: http://mvps.org/word
TechTrax eZine: http://mousetrax.com/techtrax/
MVP FAQ site: http://mvps.org/
 
O

Ook

It was indeed unstable, but at least I was able to get it open. I
immediately saved it in different formats, and the RTF format seems to have
preserved everything AND got rid of the corruption. I still need to go over
it thoroughly, so I'm not sure what I have, but at least I am able to open
the document and get to the contents. I am hopefull that I'll be able to
salvage most of it. At this point, recovering it is no longer the issue, but
recovering it without having to spend days reformatting everything. The
repair/export process completely trashes my tables. I'll have to give the
convert to text/back to table and see how well it works, as I have a lot of
tables in the document.

I gotta say, though, that this really bites. How common is this? I'm a
WordPerfect fan, so my Word experiences are somewhat limited. Are corrupted
Word documents really all that common?
 
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