Fix corrupted MS Office documents using OpenOffice

[benali72]

On rare occasions you'll find that a Microsoft Office document gets corrupted. Examples--

1. Word suddenly does not display italics properly
2. Powerpoint suddenly displays slides skewed off to the side of the page

In both these cases, I found OpenOffice corrects the corruption. Just open up the file under OO then save it in MS document compatibility mode (*.doc or *.ppt). Since OO knows it is responsible for writing a valid file, it will eliminate the corruption it finds. Note that sometimes you will lose recent changes as OO "rolls back" changes until it can write a valid MS Office format file.

This trick has worked for me three times now so I thought it worth passing along. Now if I could only convince the clients to use OO instead of MS Office I wouldn't even have to worry about this.

[WhoDo]

I found OpenOffice corrects the corruption.

Good tip, Howard. As an old MS Office SOE support person, I have another way that usually works and you don't need OpenOffice - of course I prefer OOo anyway, but some have no choice with a work machine, etc.

• * Open the MS Office application that the document should run with; Word, Excel, PowerPoint etc.
  * Then use the File>Open menu option to navigate to where the corrupt file is located.
  * Highlight the corrupt file but do NOT choose the open button in the dialog box.
  * Instead, click the down arrowhead next to the word OPEN in the dialog and choose "Open and Repair" from the drop down list

The MS Office application will look for corruptions in the file, tell you what they are and let you open the document with them "quarantined" as it were.

Such a useful feature and unfortunately very few people even know it exists. *sigh*

[benali72]

>>>>> Such a useful feature and unfortunately very few people even know it exists. *sigh*

Thanks for the tip, I didn't know about this feature. Sometimes the "hidden menu items" concept really hurts! (LIke many casual Office users I'd rather see all menu items all the time.) Thanks again.

[disciple]

These tips might be just what I need. I had some corrupted files yesterday and MS Office told me to open and repair them, but I couldn't figure out how to actually do that... they could have actually told me how, but I guess that would be against the MS ethos