Trouble opening Word

Own_My_Own

Hi, my dd has all the course work she did yesterday on Word, only we now can't open it.

Every time she tries is comes up with-

The document 'Task 1' caused a serious error the last time it was opened. You may continue opening it or perform data recovery by clicking 'Recover Data'. Clicking 'Recover Data' will extract text out of your document but all formatting and pictures will be lost.

Recover Data is not responding and it keeps saying it is not connected to the internet we it is.

There are no photos in the documents.

She is really worried she has lost everything.

Mirno

If you can't recover it in word, then try dragging the file into notepad.
This will give a "raw" view of the file. If the document doesn't contain much formatting (change of font, size, underlining etc.) then the body of text should be more or less unchanged in there somewhere.

It's a bit of a last resort, but if the file is good-ish (not totally corrupt) then you may be able to dig large chunks of it out.

cookie365

First of all, make a copy of the document in Windows explorer (assuming it's windows) so anything you try on copies doesn't make things worse.

How big is the file size? If she's pasting a lot of huge images into a Word doc it might just be taking a long time to manage them.

Try to open a copy in LibreOffice.

What format is it? .docx? If so, try to rename the copy as with a .zip extension. You should then be able to explore through the different folders to find the images and text, if not the formatting, to recreate the document.

Own_My_Own

Thank You for the replies.

She has managed to email her work to me and open it that way. It is all now saved on a memory stick.

I will get her to take the laptop into school tomorrow and get an IT teacher to open them. She is too frightened to do anymore work today incase any new documents won't open.

macman

Try opening it from within Word rather than by double clicking the data file.

sparkyspark

This issue ussually occurs because the file appears on the list of disabled files for the Microsoft Office program. The program adds a file to this list if the file causes a serious error, such as causing the program to close unexpectedly during two or more attempts to open it.

As you've not stated which version of office your using:
In Word 2003 or Excel 2003, click ‘About Microsoft Program’ on the ‘Help’ menu to view the list of disabled files.
Click ‘Disabled Items’
To re-enable one of the listed items, click the item, and then click ‘Enable’.

In Word 2007 or Excel 2007, click the ‘Microsoft Office’ Button, and then click ‘Word Options’ to view the list of disabled files.
In the left pane, click ‘Add-Ins’.
In the right pane, select ‘Disabled Items’ in the ‘Manage’ list, and then click ‘Go’
To re-enable one of the listed items, click the item, and then click ‘Enable’.

Microsoft Office 2010 Click on 'File', then click on 'Options., click on 'Add-Ins'.
Click on the drop down box, click on 'Disabled Items', Click on 'Go'.
Select the file. and click 'Enable'.

Haven't got office 2013 but I would imagine the option to fix this is very similar.