It may happen that, during the preparation of a document or a spreadsheet, the program or PC goes haywire for no reason; if in the meantime we were operating on the file, it could appear as damaged on the next boot, making us lose all the work done up to that moment. Theoretically Word and Microsoft Office programs have an internal recovery system that should show files that have become corrupt or damaged after a crash.
But sometimes this system fails, showing an empty document or with strange characters.
We must not despair: there are still some methods that we can use to try to restore the corrupt or damaged file.
In this guide we will show you all the solutions we can apply to recover damaged or corrupt Word documents or Excel spreadsheets .
Only after having tried them all can we say goodbye to our work, but with due attention and speed, we will be able to recover the file in the vast majority of cases .
READ ALSO -> Extract and recover files from damaged and corrupt ZIP and RAR files
1) Restore with Word or Excel
If the file had been saved but has become corrupted, when you try to open it it gives an error, sometimes because it says it is damaged, sometimes because you don't have permission for various other things.
Office can help you recover the damaged file or restore a previous version completely automatically with the integrated recovery tool.
To use this recovery tool, open Word or Excel, go to the File -> Open menu, select the damaged file with the right mouse button and, in the drop-down menu, select Open a copy or Open and restore .
If this is not enough to restore the file, we can try to open a copy of the unsaved documents by clicking at the bottom (in the same screen) on the item Recover unsaved documents .
2) Restore from file history
On Windows, you can activate a fully automatic backup of personal files created and modified on your PC, called File History .
It saves, on an external drive or a network drive, a copy of every modification applied to a specific file, the important thing is that the folder where the damaged file is contained is one of the "monitored" ones for automatic backup.
To check that File History is up and running, click the Start icon at the bottom left, then type File History on the keyboard; in the Start menu the item Restore files with File history should appear , on which we will have to click to be able to access the backup of all the files.
If the backup is present, simply navigate in the saved folders to the path where the corrupt file is saved, so you can see all the copies saved and restore one made on a date prior to the problem.
To speed up we can also right click on the corrupt Word or Excel file, open the Properties menu and go to the Previous Versions tab, where we can immediately restore a working version of the file.
To learn more about the backup with File History, please read our guide on the subject -> All the backup and restore tools included in Windows.
3) Word and Excel document recovery programs
If with the methods we have seen so far we have not restored our document, we can rely on one of the following free programs designed for restoring Word and Excel files.
- A good program that can open corrupt and damaged Office files is RepairMyWord .
It manages to open the file in a text file that can easily be copied and pasted into a new Word file; unfortunately it is not able to open documents in .docx format but only simple .doc.
- To recover Excel xls files we can use RepairmyExcel and it works like the program seen previously: the tables are read and, with the copy and paste, they can be brought to a new Excel file.
- To open a damaged or corrupt Word or Excel document we can also try the free office suite LibreOffice .
It is capable of opening damaged files with good results, especially where Word and Excel have failed.
Once the damaged documents are opened with LibreOffice, we can export them again to new .doc and .xls files, so as to remove the errors.
- If we are looking for something more powerful and effective on all types of Word and Excel documents, we can use Stellar Repair for Word and Stellar Repair for Excel, free tools that can open any .doc, docx, .xls and .xlsx files for attempt recovery or recovery of corrupt data.
- A suite of programs to be used to recover Word and Excel files is offered by Savvy Family of Corrupt File Recovery .
Both programs are on the indicated page, we will only have to download them to our PC and start them; once opened, we indicate the file or files to be recovered and start restoring them.
These two programs have the advantage of being portable applications, that is, that they must not be installed on the PC and can also be started from a USB stick.
- Another good program to recover Word documents is WordFIX, available for free and simple to use.
Once downloaded, simply start it and drag the corrupt or damaged Word file into the interface, to start the recovery.
- Among the various software that can repair Word files we also recommend Kernel for Word Repair, free and light.
- Other interesting solutions are in the article on how to repair damaged and corrupt files, with File Repair and other special software to restore Word files and Excel files (to try as a free trial).
4) Conclusions
These tools do not need instructions for use because they only do what they have been developed for almost completely automatically: just load the corrupt file into their interface and wait for the recovery process to end.
In most cases they succeed in their work, recovering the damaged or corrupt file.
In the event that the Word document or the Excel table had been deleted by mistake, I recommend reading the post on how to recover deleted files on the disk or USB sticks.
If, on the other hand, we want to restore other types of damaged and corrupt files (for example MP3, videos and images), we invite you to read our guide below.
READ ALSO -> How to recover an unsaved Office file from Excel, Word and PowerPoint
