The problem
It can be deplorably frustrating when you try opening your perfectly fine word documents only to be greeted with the error message below.
If this has happened to you, then this post was written with you in mind.
Does this mean you cannot ever read your files? Well, fortunately you still can. I would want to show how you too can quickly fix this problem.
You would need a few tools and even fewer steps to fix it. In no time at all, you will be able to read your Word documents.
What you need
- A file editor (I used Notepad plus plus)
- A zipping or file archiving program ( I used WinRAR )
Steps
When you have the tools to salvage the situation, all that is left is a little direction.
Warning
I should first start with a little notice. And that is you should be comfortable changing file extensions. If you are not, then you might end up permanently corrupting your file!
With that out of the way, let us commence with the steps;
Change from Word to Zip
- You first start with your word document.
- Change the .docx file to .zip format.
- Extract just the one corrupt .xml file from the compressed folder. That file would have been the one that showed up in the error message.
- By using your word editor pretty print the .xml file with line breaks. All we are trying to do here is to format the xml file into several lines instead of one long line.
- Save the .xml file back into the .zip file.
Change from Zip back to Word
- Change the .zip file back into .docx file
Half way done
Hold on a minute, you are still not done yet;
- Open the .docx file again. You will have an error. But this time around you will be able to determine which line number the error occurs on.
With that piece of information you now know which block of code to take out. Once this block is taken out, your headache is also gone.
Change from Word to Zip for a second time
- Change the file from .docx back to .zip
- Extract the corrupt .xml file from the .zip
- Open the .xml file and delete that entire block of code.
- Save the .xml file
- Save the .xml back into the .zip file
The final touch
- Change the extensions of the .zip file back to .docx
And viola your problem is solved.
I honestly hope that it proves to be useful to someone out there.
Thank you for reading. Do not forget to subscribe, bookmark, and share the post. Have a great day. Cheers.
This is quite interesting. I’m glad to have chanced on your blog.
I would like to know your thoughts on the new Autosave functionality in Word. I once couldn’t recover a document I had been manually saving offline. It was such a headache. What is the best way to optimize the Autosave functionality?
I know exactly what you mean. If care is not taken you could auto-recover an older version of the file. What I advise is
1) Always make sure you are signed into your office account ( if possible and you have internet access )
2) Be careful of opening 2 versions of the same file on the same PC at the same time. Windows will warn you that you are doing this. It will then set one to read-only
3) If uncertain, still use Control + S. Yes, it is true auto-save does save automatically. However, if you are off the internet, you will still want to use Control + S.
4) Read through before you close. Make sure all your content is in there before you close the document. We do not want any surprises.