Recover Microsoft Word Documents

Have you lost Microsoft Word files? Do you need to recover Word documents you were working on? Don't worry. It's more than likely that your work is still on your computer's hard drive. It's easier than you think to recover lost documents.

Repair corrupt Word documents

Perhaps your document isn't lost at all, but has been corrupted or damaged. Many Microsoft Word users don't realise that the software has a built-in document repair feature. Click on File, Open and locate the file you want to recover, then click the arrow next to the Open button and select Open and Repair.

If that doesn't help, then Word also has an option to recover text from any file. Click on Tools, Options, select General, make sure that Confirm conversion at Open is checked, then click OK. Now click on File, Open. In the Files of type: drop-down list, select Recover Text from Any File. Then select and open the document in the normal way. If you don't see the "Recover Text..." option in the drop-down list, you (or your system administrator) will need to install the Recover Text Converter.

Finding lost documents

If you can't find the document you want then it might have been saved by mistake in a different location. Use the Windows Search tool to search your hard drive for the file. You can search by name, or look for a phrase that you know is in the document itself.

One of the most common causes of lost DOC and RTF files is accidental deletion. Don't forget to look for deleted Word documents in your computer's Recycle Bin. When you open the Recycle Bin, click on the Type column header to sort the file list by type. It's easier than looking through the whole list for a deleted Word document.

Recover lost documents

Even if your document cannot be found, you still have a good chance of recovering it. The same is true if the file has been overwritten by saving another document over the top of it. Microsoft Word makes temporary and backup copies of files as you work. The space they occupied may not be re-used for months. You can't get at this data using standard Windows tools, but it can be accessed using specialist data recovery software.

Click here for Word document recovery software

There are many data recovery products to choose from, but it's best to choose a tool that has been designed specifically to recover Word documents. Specialist Word recovery software can recognise the structures and "signatures" of DOC and RTF files and will find them where more general purpose tools won't.

Although general purpose undelete software may recover DOC files that were recently deleted, they may cause unnecessary alarm by failing to find files that other products could recover. The more you use a computer, the greater the chance that hidden data containing your document gets overwritten by some other file. For the best chance of a successful data recovery, use a Microsoft Word recovery product right from the start.

See a tutorial on how to recover Word documents