Microsoft Word is the most popular word-processing application available today. Professional documents can be created utilizing its advanced features, and that too with utmost ease. But, those who use Microsoft Word on regular basis are aware of the corruption issues which keep bothering them. Corruption of Word documents is a serious problem as it leads to catastrophic data loss problems. If you ever encounter such a situation, then besides relying just on a backup copy, you can look up to Word repair strategies as suggested by Microsoft. There are various methods, like Open and Repair, which might help you in recovering the text of the affected document. However, if you want to go for absolute recovery, there is a hope in the form of a third-party repair software.

Consider a situation, wherein, you have installed Microsoft Word 2003 on your system. You have a document stored on a HTTP or FTP location. This document was created in an earlier version of MS Word. When you make an attempt to open it, you might receive the following error message which goes like:

"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.
(path\filename)"

It is due to the above error message that you are unable to extract information from the Word document in question.

Cause

The above abrupt behavior is witnessed with Word documents in the following conditions:

• If you try and open the Word document using the following steps:
1. If you click a Hyperlink in an HTML document in a Web browser
2. In Word 2003, you go to the File menu and click OK
• Or if the Word document is corrupt or damaged

Resolution

You must observe the following steps in order to get rid off the erroneous situation and perform Word recovery.

• You can avoid this problem or issue if you install Office 2003 Service Pack 3
• If the above solution doesn't solve the problem, then you must repair the corrupt Word document by using 'Open and Repair' feature of the Word.
• If you still do not yield any positive results, it is good that you opt for a professional Word repair software.

These advanced tools have become popular lately as they assist you in repairing a corrupt Word document easily.

One of the reliable tools available is Stellar Phoenix Word Recovery. This application has an intuitive GUI and efficiently repairs Word documents created with MS Word 2007, 2003, 2002 and 2000 versions The Word recovery application repairs and recovers all components of a damaged Word document including tables, graphics, charts etc.