Microsoft Word is probably the most extensively used word-processing application across the world. It helps you create visually compelling documents in an easy way. However, at certain times, you may encounter several errors while opening a Word document. As a result of the errors, you might not be able to access data stored into a Word document or even if you open the document, you would see irrelevant text accompanied by junk characters. These are clean signs of corruption. In order to compensate the data loss due to corruption, you must have a clean backup copy of the affected document. You can also try repairing the Word document by using inbuilt 'Open and Repair' feature. If you fail to overcome the problem, do not worry. You still have a good chance of repairing a corrupt document by using a reliable Word repair software.

Consider a scenario, wherein, you have stored the details of an upcoming business project in a Word document (to be presented tomorrow). When you open the document, created with Word 2003, in order to have a re-look at the certain figures, you instead receive the following appalling error:

“Word was unable to read this document. It may be corrupt.
Try one or more of the following:
* Open and Repair the file.
* Open the file with the Text Recovery converter.
(C:\Documents and Settings\...\test.doc)”

Cause

The above error message clearly shows that your Word document is corrupt and there is a need to perform immediate Word recovery.

Resolution

You can troubleshoot the problem by observing the following steps: