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Of interest to those who occasionally grapple with corrupt Word files:
Over the past year, I've encountered a handful of files that were
corrupt in uniquely interesting ways that would reliably crash Word
whether I opened the file, inserted it in a new document, or copied
everything except the final paragraph marker into a new document. No
luck.
In a fit of desperation, I tried importing the corrupt files in Adobe's
InDesign CS software, and wondrous to behold, it opened every last file
with not so much as a hiccup. It let me recover the full text of the
files, and even some of the graphics. (I say 'some' because I didn't
check all the graphics... just deleted them from the file because that
was part of the edit procedure anyway. The recovery may have been 100%,
but I simply didn't check this.)
Copy and paste them into a new Word document and away you go. I won't
swear that this will recover everything from a truly amazingly corrupt
file, but it's gotten me out of several sticky situations I couldn't
solve in any other way... and as you know, I'm fairly creative. <g>
(Yes, I wrote a fan letter to the Adobe development team. They were
quite pleased to receive this feedback, but did not comment on my
suggestion that maybe they could share their "open file" code with
Microsoft. <g>)
You lose tracked changes in this approach (all insertions and deletions
are accepted, and the comments seem to disappear where I couldn't
retrieve them), but you can at least get the text back, nice and clean.
That leads me to a bonus tip: If you've tracked your edits, reached the
last line of the file, and saved it before corruption struck,
persevere! Recover the file as described above, producing a "final"
document with all edits accepted. Open the original document from the
author, open the Tools menu, select Track Changes, then select Compare
documents. Compare the original with the Word file you created using
the text recovered from InDesign. After a bit of chugging, the
resulting document contains your original edits correctly tracked.
But what if the resulting document also contains the seeds of
corruption? Bonus bonus tip: Call in "Spike"! (No, not James Marsters.
<g>) Word lets you select text, including tracked changes, rip it out
of the document, and jab it onto a virtual spike--like those things
they use in paperbound offices to impale bills and correspondence--for
future use. You can then paste that text anywhere you want, just as if
you had copied the text to the regular clipboard--but without losing
tracked changes.
To copy text to the spike, first turn off revision tracking
(important!) if you don't want the removed text treated as a deletion,
and definitely turn it off before inserting the spiked text so you
won't lose the tracked changes. Next, select the target text and press
Control/Command-F3 (Windows/Mac) to spike the text; to unspike it <g>
and paste it into the new location, position the cursor at the new
location, and press Control/Command-Shift-F3. If you're trying to
forestall corruption, copy everything except the final paragraph marker
and paste it into a squeaky clean new document.
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