Opening a Corrupt Document That Causes Word to Crash

• Microsoft Word for the Macintosh, versions 3.0, 3.01, 3.02, 4.0, 5.0, 5.1

SUMMARY

Below are two techniques that may help you recover a corrupt document in Word for the Macintosh.

MORE INFORMATION

Word Versions 5.0 and 5.1

It is sometimes possible to retrieve the text of a corrupt document using the Find File function in 5.0 and 5.1.

NOTE: Formatting will be lost.

Use the following process:

1. From the File menu, choose Find File.

2. In the Search window, select the proper Drives/Location of the document. In the File Types list, select Readable Files. Choose OK.

3. In the Find File dialog box, set the View to Contents. Scroll through the list of shown files and select (click once) the name of the document you are trying to reopen.

4. In the preview window (if the file contents appear), select the text, and from the Edit menu, choose Copy. Close the Find File window.

5. In a new document, choose Paste from the Edit menu. The selected text from the Find File window should appear.

Word Versions 4.0, 5.0, and 5.1

When a corrupt document causes Word to stop, the document can usually be opened as a text file. To do this, the file type of the document must be changed to TEXT, and then the document can be opened in Word, as follows:

1. Start any application or desk accessory (DA) that can change the file type of a document, such as ResEdit, Filetools, or FileManager.

2. Change the file type of the corrupt document from WDBN to TEXT.

3. Quit the application or DA and save the changes to the document.

4. Open the document with Word.

Versions of Word later than 4.0b cannot be used for this procedure because of changes made to facilitate file transfers with Microsoft Word for Windows. Instead of looking at the file type of the document to check whether it is in normal format or a text format, later versions of Word look at the information at the beginning of the file. A file editor can be used to change the first 2 bytes of a file to allow these versions of Word to open the document. Change either the first or the second byte of a file to be anything except what it currently is.