Keep Calm Mr Mainwaring! Keep Calm!
Last week received my Warrior’s Surrender manuscript from my Copy Editor and didn’t realise it was corrupt. I could open it, make all my changes (saving as I went) but when I closed the document, it wouldn’t reopen!
I hadn’t realised that the file was corrupt until after I had sent it back to my publisher and they couldn’t open it, so I did four hours of editing over again – and the same thing happened!
Arrrrggghhhh!!!!!
So, I have a few tips for authors who may find themselves in the nightmarish situation of having a Word document become corrupt and will not open.
This is assuming that you already do all the right things of saving your work regularly and you have back up files.
In my case I was working on returned copy edits, so I only had one file which was corrupt.
Here, have another drink. You need it.
1. Don’t panic – take a deep breath, you may not have lost everything.
2. Word is a complex program, and not a single document.
Here are three ways that you may be able to recover the document. Good luck!
Option 1 — Open & Recover
— Open Word
— Navigate to your document and select it.
— Use the drop down button next to open and select ‘open and recover’
Option 2 — ‘unzip’ Word
— Go to your corrupt document
— Right mouse click to open a menu. You may have a zip file program like 7-Zip show up below Print (if you don’t you can download it for free direct or through Ninite*)
— Open with 7-Zip. You will be given several options for opening. Select Extract to: ‘your document’s file name’.
— Open the folder. You will see a number of different files. The one you want is marked either Document or Word Document
— Right mouse click and select Rename. Change the file extension (if it has one to .xml)
— Save
— Right mouse click and select Open with Note pad.
— All of your text should be there, however it will not be formatted (which is a lot better than nothing).
— Copy & Paste the text into a new word document (be sure to keep a copy of this .xml file as an additional back up!)
Option 3 — Try Another Program
There are other word processing programs that you an use other than Microsoft Word. They are free ‘open source’ programs. You may be able to open your file using one of these. They will open Microsoft files.
The one I used is Libre Office.
— Download Libre Office *(I recommend going through Ninite.com for easy download and installation)
— When it is installed open Libre Office
— Navigate to your corrupt file
— Select Open
— In my case, not only did it open successfully, it also saved all the formatting and my copyeditor’s tracked changes and comments
— There were some minor cross-over formatting glitches (font type and size had changed when it was highlighted in a comment, but that is a seriously minor inconvenience.
Ninite.com is a handy web site that installs and updates your favourite programs and utilities automatically.
It is safe to use and very convenient. I highly recommend it.
Now, get back to work!