Repair a corrupted Word document online

Why it happens

• Downloads, attachments and syncs that stop part-way.
• Documents generated by templates and scripts that write invalid XML.
• Saves interrupted by a crash or a full disk.
• Old .doc files whose internal filesystem is damaged.

Try these first, they're free

1. 1If the file came from email or the web, right-click it, choose Properties, tick Unblock and press OK. Windows blocks downloaded files, and Word then refuses to open them in ways that look like damage.
2. 2Check the file's size. A file of 0 KB holds nothing at all, so look for another copy (the sender, OneDrive version history, a backup).
3. 3In Word, choose File › Open, select the file, click the arrow next to Open and choose Open and Repair.

How we fix it

We repair the broken part, keep every paragraph we can read, check the result against Microsoft's Open XML validator and show you the pages before you download. Old .doc files come back as .docx.

On 384 damaged Office files, we recovered 81% of the content; Office's own repair recovered 53%. See the benchmark.

Other messages

• Word found unreadable content
• Word: “We can't open the file because we found a problem with its contents”
• Excel: “We found a problem with some content”
• Excel cannot open the file because the format or extension is not valid