I use Microsoft Office Word 2007. I need help in opening a corrupted file. I tried to open but am getting messages: "cannot be opened", "unreadable content", "do you want to recover contents?" "Do you want to search for a converter?"

Anyone have any ideas on how I can get this file to open? :/

Thank you,

Chuck in California

From Microsoft Documentation:-

If a file has been damaged and you cannot open it by normal means, you may be able to recover its content by using the Open and Repair feature.

• Click the Microsoft Office Button
• Browse to the file that you want to recover, and click it (do not double-click it).
• Click the arrow next to the Open button, and then click Open and Repair.

You might also like to look at this (which is just a longer version of what's above):-

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/893672?wa=wsignin1.0 

Hope this will help

How to troubleshoot damaged documents in Word 2007 and in Word 2010: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/918429

 

Try changing the file's extension from docx/docm to zip and opening it as a zip archive. If that works, check that the xml files are actually for Word, not for a different application. If you can't open the  zip archive, you're unlikely to be able to recover anything meaningful. In that case, re-load the file from your last known good backup and re-do whatever has been lost.

The .docx file you are trying to open seems to be corrupted therefore, you are getting the above errors. Whenever a Word document gets corrupted, we must try to open it by Open and Repair. This is a built-in repair function of MS Word that repairs a corrupt word document and opens it. 

Open your MS Word program > click on Office button > click on Open > locate the corrupt .docx file > click on the arrow shown next to the Open button.

Within a few seconds the selected .docx file will be repaired and opened. If this fails to open the .docx file and you are still facing those error messages, then I'll suggest you to check some Docx recovery applications. You can check SysInfoTools Docx Recovery software. I've read about it in an article. It's available with demo version which can be freely downloaded from sysinfotools' website.

I hope this helps you repair your corrupt .docx file.