Little is as frustrating as losing a document that you have spent hours working on and having to recreate the document from scratch. Before you recreate, here are some potential solutions to recover your corrupted Word Document.

1. Make a copy of the corrupt document. Create a version that you can return to if other methods further corrupt the document
2. Try opening the document on another computer – sometimes the issue is local (Operating System or Word)
3. Run Chkdsk – If the issue is disk corruption, Chkdsk may repair the file system and allow the document to function properly
4. Try opening the file in another editor – Wordpad, Notepad, or other editors may allow you to recover the entire document, or at least the raw text
5. Use the “Open and Repair” option n Word – select the file in the Open dialog box and choose Open And Repair from the Open drop-down list in the bottom-right corner. This will force Word to attempt to recover the document.

If these methods don’t succeed, there are a couple of options to consider:

1. Look for copies of the document outside of the local system. Check your e-mail to see if you may have a copy there
2. Use Shadow Copy to recover recent versions of the document. To do so, right-click on the document and select the Properties command from the shortcut menu. When the document’s properties sheet appears, select the Previous Versions tab. The Previous Versions tab will show you any previous versions of the file that are available.
3. Use a recovery program. OfficeRecovery and Ontrack both offer solutions to attempt to recover important documents.