Microsoft Word is a powerful word processor and is widely used by people all over the world. It is very easy to use. A new user needs to simply start the Word application. He needs to simply keep typing after that. To apply simple formatting, like, making a few words bold, Italisized or underlined, just requires selecting the text and clicking the respective button. But despite all the features offered by this application, it has its own set of drawbacks. For example, its files unexpectedly tend to get corrupt at times. Unless you have backup, it is very difficult to opt for Word recovery Tool.

Consider you have a MS Word 2003 on your computer, and you try to open a document, and the document refuses to open, while giving following error message:

Word was unable to read this file. It may be corrupt.
Try one or more of the following:
Open and Repair the file.
Open the file with Text Recovery converter.

Reason:
The reason behind such a behavior is corruption of Word document.

Resolution:
Open document using Open and Repair feature of MS Word. For this, in the Open dialog box of Word, choose the file you want to open, and instead of clicking Open, click on the small button at the right corner of this button. In the drop down menu, select Open and Repair. This should repair word file and help open it.
If the above step doesn't work, try to open the document in draft mode. For this, select Normal in View menu, followed by Options in Tools Menu. The options dialog box opens up. In the view tab, select the checkbox marked Picture placeholders under Show. Select Draft font box found under Outline and Normal options. This needs to be followed by deselecting the Update automatic links at Open checkbox in General Options of the General Tab. Select OK. Try to open the file after this. It should help in performing doc repair, in case the links were damaged and were preventing the document from opening.
If the problem was not because of links, then simply undo the changes made in Options dialog box to deselect Picture placeholders checkbox, and select the Update automatic links at Open check box. After this open a blank document and insert the document that you are trying to open forcomprehensive Word repair.
If it doesn't open, then you'll need to link the document. However, if even this doesn't help, open the file using the WordPad application and then save it in .rtf format. Whatever can be extracted will be saved in this file. Now, open this .rtf file using MS Word, and save it in .doc format. The only thing that you will need to do is, reapply lost formatting.
However, if all these steps fail, then you will need to opt for Word recovery software.