How to recover Word documents

Using the Office Recovery or Word Recovery software it is very easy to recover Word documents that have been deleted or lost. The screenshots in this tutorial show Office Recovery being used, but both products work in the same way. The only difference is that the lower priced Word Recovery is only able to recover Word documents.

Download Office Recovery or Word Recovery

After you have installed the software, you are ready to recover documents.

1. Start Office Recovery or Word Recovery and click Next.

2. Select the hard drive or other storage device that contained your lost Word documents, and click Next.

3. Now you must wait while the recovery program searches the drive for lost and deleted documents. This will take some time. As documents are found, a small preview of each one is shown.

4. When the scan is finished, Word Recovery will display a list of all the files that were recovered. Select any file by clicking on it to see a preview of the file itself. Use the Settings menu to set how the list should be displayed, e.g. as icons or in a list.

You can use filters to help locate the files you need to recover. Filters can limit the files shown in the list to those of specified types, files containing specific text, having a specific title or author, a particular size or being modified at a particular time.

5. You can click Properties to see the document summary details of any selected file.

6.  You can also click Preview and see a full preview of the recovered document.

7. To recover the Word documents, select the files you wish to recover from the list (ensure that the check boxes for those files are ticked) and then click Recover. You will be prompted for a location to save the recovered files. Note that this should be a different drive to the one that contained the files to avoid the risk of overwriting the unallocated space containing the data you want to recover. It is advised to choose a location such as a network drive, external hard drive or USB memory stick.

Download Office Recovery or Download Word Recovery