No luck this time, but sometimes it does work, in which case you can just scroll down and find the recovered text and copy/paste it into a new, clean document. Not much there of interest, alas, and on the very bottom you can see that it recovered 108 words. Don’t be alarmed, it’s typically gobbledygook, like this:

There’s an update window that offers less choices than you might expect, but:Īnd behind it is that new doc with whatever it could salvage. The tool will grind through the document and produce a new doc that has every snippet of text it could find that’s not part of the current version. Choose Yes to open this file only if you are sure it is from a trusted source.” Since it’s your own file and not likely to be infected with a macro virus or similar, choose “ Yes” to proceed. A window pops up:Īs it says, “This file needs to be opened by the Recover Text from Any File text converter, which may pose a security risk if the file you are opening is a malicious file. With that option, find and open the Word document you want to examine. Since the file in question is opening up, but isn’t showing the desired text, let’s choose “Recover Text”, as shown. You can choose from Original, Repair, and Recover Text. On the right, it shows “Open: Original” but if you click on it, there are actually three different choices, as shown. Notice down at the bottom the “ Options” button. That’s what we’ll be using for this example.įirst off, launch Microsoft Word and choose File > Open… Note: for this particular Q&A they kindly sent me a copy of their original Word document so I could try to recover it. Odd, eh? Still, let’s poke around and see what we can do.

Turns out that corrupted Word files are so common that the Microsoft Office suite actually includes a recovery and repair program as part of the suite.Ĭuriously, though, it’s pretty hard to find and if you search for ‘recovery’ in the Word help system there are zero matches, even though it offers a recovery feature. Still, the real question is whether there are versions of the file and whether you have autosave or version tracking enabled on your copy of Microsoft Word. But maybe we can rummage in the file and find some of it, however, so not all is lost. Odds are that you cannot recover the text that you’ve lost.

Restore word file on mac