Help repair a damaged Word file

This is an interesting question, and my first time answering on this forum :) If the file had been encrypted, generic recovery tools would not be able to show any partially recovered data, so that's good news if generic recovery tools are showing some results. (They'll always have you pay the licensing fee for recovery though, otherwise people would just download the trial program once when something bad happens and never actually make the purchase). There's a number of things that could cause file corruption. If it's a .docx, a quick test to see the extent of the damage, try to open the file in winzip or 7zip or any unzip utility. .docx is a zipped xml based file container, and word puts all that glue together to format a document. Within that zip you'll typically see a list of files like document.xml, settings.xml, styles.xml, etc. If a file in the file container is damaged, word will just fall over dead. If you can open it in a zip archive utility like winzip or 7zip, we can talk further about a manual recovery. I dont know of any utilities offhand that would do it for free however.

Step 1: Start Word.

To do this, follow these steps:

a. Click Start, and then click Run.

b. In the Open box, type winword, and then click OK.

Step 2: Locate the Word document that you are trying to open.

To do this, follow these steps:

a. On the File menu in Word, click Open.

Note If the Open command does not appear on the File menu, do the following. Notice the arrows at the bottom of the File menu. Click these arrows. This will expand the menu and display all the menu commands.

b. In the Open dialog box, locate your Word document. Then, click to select your Word document.

c. Click the arrow next to the Open button, and then click Open and Repair.

d. you can try to use repair word document, it's a very nice paid service