Microsoft Word needs no introduction. It is by far the most popular and feature-rich word processing program available to professionals. You can create interesting yet professional documents with much ease. However, being a regular user, you might experience several problems while trying to open a Word document. Many-a-times, the Word application would crash or you will get different error messages while opening documents. These kinds of irregularities in Microsoft Word hint towards a bigger problem which is corruption. Corruption of a Word document can be a dreadful situation if you lose valuable data. Thankfully, you can handle such situations and easily compensate data loss by procuring a backup copy, or otherwise, employing various Word repair strategies.

Let's consider a practical scenario, wherein, you are a journalist working on a feature from the past few days. You create a document in Word 2003. When you open the document to do last-minute editing before sending it across, you receive the following error message:

"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

As stated in the above error message, the document you are trying to open is corrupt. It could have got corrupt due to reasons like application malfunction, abrupt system shutdown, or power surges. In order to recover data from a corrupt document, it is required that you consider performing repair word file by employing various repair techniques.

Resolution

Consider the following steps to troubleshoot damaged Word document:

To achieve efficient results, it is recommended you go for a robust software like Stellar Phoenix Word Recovery. The application repairs and recovers corrupt Word documents in a small span of time.
Touted as the most-trusted Word recovery software, this tool also recovers all the components including text, graphics, tables etc.