How to "repair" or recover text from a corrupt Word 2007 (.docx) file

Corrupt Word 2007-docx Notification Window

Word 2007 files are in Microsoft Office new zip file compressed XML format. They are actually a zipped collection of XML files. With successive versions of Word, the abilities to recover from file corruption have increased. If your file is too corrupt to recover, Word provides the ability to recover the text, so you don't have to retype your document. You will have to reformat it. Although Word probably continues to advance in file corruption repair the final resort text extraction may have gotten worse instead of better from Word 2003 to 2007. This probably has to do with the strict nature of the XML file format. If the word/document.xml file (which contains all your text) within the larger zip file is corrupt, Word may balk on providing any text. To make a long story short, this article provides a link to a freeware program which recovers as much text from the corrupt word/document.xml contained within the larger 2007 Word file as is possible and will work where Word 2007 fails. It provides some rudimentary text formatting such as paragraph and line breaks, although it guesses at this.

Difficulty:

Moderately Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need

• Word 2007
• Internet Connection
• damageddocx2txt.exe

1. Download

   Go to the link provided in the resources list at the bottom of the page. Download the dd2tx.zip distribution of damageddocx2txt.exe, by clicking on the damageddocx2txt link.

2. Unzip

   Unzip the file into the directory of your choice. The dd2txt folder will be created. The freeware damageddocx2txt text extractor is within this folder.

3. Select docx

   Double click on damageddocx2txt.exe. Click the Open choice on the File Menu and choose your damaged docx Word 2007 file.

4. Recovert text

   Your text will automatically be extracted from your corrupt 2007 file and will be displayed in the text editor.

5. Save text

   Then simply click on the File Menu again and choose to Save. Name and save your text file wherever you wish.

6. Paste in Word

   Double click on the text file wherever it is and Windows Text Editor should open. Hit Ctl + A on your keyboard to select all the text in the file. Then hit Ctl + C on your keyboard to Copy all the text. Open a new Word file and paste in the text.

Tips & Warnings

• There is an extensive right click menu in the original damageddocx2txt program which allows you to select all the text and copy it to the clipboard for pasting into a new Word file.

• You can also open the text file directly in Word 2007 by changing the file type Word 2007 is looking for, from docx to txt or "all files".

Resources

• Location for downloading damageddocx2txt.