HELP - My Nightmare scenario

[Charlie O'Donnell]

HELP!

My document refuses to open - I have a large file indexed and referenced
that I have compiled since February this year for my studies. It is 300+
pages in total and it is vital for my exam in October. F**king word 2007 now
refuses to open it:

The Office Open XML file AS208 MY NOTEBOOK cannot be opened because there
are problems with the contents.
Location: Part:/word/document.xml, Line 2, Column: 890169

I desperately need help in solving this as I need the file for my revision -
the file was saved prior to the refusal to open.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Try clicking the arrow beside the Open button in the Open dialog and
choosing Open and Repair.

 

[Charlie O'Donnell]

Thanks, but I already tried that one and it doesn't want to know - I have
even tried converting to PDF, but of course that app needs to load the Word
file in Word first before conversion.

 

[Herb Tyson [MVP]]

If you have Always Create Backup Copies enabled, look for files named Backup
of [filename] in the same folder where the original file resides. If you
find any, copy them to new file names and then see if they can be opened
normally. It's possible that a backup copy still works.

If you don't have backups enabled and haven't otherwise been making backup
copies... if you are using Vista Ultimate or Business (not sure which other
versions have this feature), open Windows Explorer, right click on the file,
and choose Properties. Click on the Previous Versions tab and see if there
are any shadow copies available that can be restored.

If both of those fail... you might be stuck trying to salvage what you can
from the .docx file. Rename the file so that it has a .zip extension. Open
the zip file and drill down to the word folder, and look for a file named
Document.xml. If you are very careful, it is *possible* that you can repair
the xml file. Not likely... but possible. I have done it, but only on much
smaller files where I was able to compare the original working file to the
damaged one.

Other than that, the document.xml file will contain the contents of your
file -- formatted in XML. By careful/judicious use of Find/Replace, you can
strip out the XML to recover just the text... probably not what you want,
but possibly better than nothing.

 

[Brian]

Can you open the document in Wordpad. If so save as an RTF file and re-open
in word. Note, however, thath your formatting will be lost.

Hope this helps,