When Word Documents Go Bad

Picture this - it's 1965 and my mother is working in the typing pool.  A director asks her to pull up a file from a few months back as he would like to use an agreement as a precedent for a similar deal that he is pitching for.  My mother dutifully tipples over to the typing cabinet (on her sensible 1.5 inch heels) and pulls out the file to copy - but to her horror (and slight bewilderment) the filing cabinet has managed to shred the letter so all she is left with is a small heap of paper scraps.

Now as far as I'm aware the above scenario never happened and probably never could have happened - maybe sometimes files got lost but most of the time if you had it in a hard copy format then you pretty much had it for as long as that hard copy lasted and even then chances are somebody had used some carbon paper to create a copy.

So why, fifty years later, am I still dealing with corrupt files?  Files that look fine and dandy on the outside but as soon as you try to open them to view their contents, the big bad message appears stating that:

Now the Show Help > > button in the diagram above actually does give you some pretty helpful hints (Microsoft Help has come a long way since Clippy!) and some of these I will include in my favourite "how to fix" list of methods below, but first let's talk about the difference between a file being "corrupt" and one that is showing signs of instability.

Signs of Instability

• The numbering in your document won't restart as it should - you've checked everything and understand list templates (or got the Geek to check these for you) and styles are correctly placed, but the numbering still won't behave as it should.
• You update your Table of Contents (TOC), save your document and upon reopening it your TOC has not updated at all!
• Your apply a style to your document that should change the font and paragraph settings but nothing happens. 

 
Signs of Corruption

• You attempt open your word file and a dialog box appears as above.
• You open your word file, it opens, you start scrolling and suddenly when you navigate beyond a certain point in your document, Word crashes and restarts.  You try to open the file again, and the same thing happens..... (you can keep doing this for a very long time....)
• You open your Word file, it opens, but what you're presented with is a bunch of gobbledigook text that your would only recognise as resembling JAVA or C# if you happened to have learnt how to code in those programming languages....

Now I'm not saying you don't have to worry about a file if it's showing signs of instability (quite often a word document that shows signs of instability means it will very soon become corrupt) but there is a big difference between your auto numbering not working within a file and losing all the text within that file.  Don't start telling people their documents are corrupt unless they actually are because if somebody truly understands the terminology they will brand you an idiot quick smart if you feed them the wrong information.

So what's my favourite method of fixing those unstable documents?  Well, if I'm not using third party macros (or my own macros) to get to the root of a problem, I tend to first and foremost rely on Word's built in repair function called "Open & Repair".  See the little video below for how to do this in Word 2010 which has been produced by KnowVidz. 

It's possibly one of the best ways to fix a file, you even get a little messagebox telling you what word has fixed (although actually translating what some of the messages are or attempting to locate the areas fixed doesn't work quite so well....).

Another easy way of removing "instabilities" is to upgrade your document to the latest (or a later) word version - so converting a Word 2003 document to Word 2010 will often fix an unstable file. 

If that doesn't work, then recreating the Word file is probably your best option - and we'll get to how best to do that within my next few posts.