Repair or Recover data from a Damaged docx, xlsx or pptx file

As almost 90 % of users make documents on Microsoft platform using Microsoft Office.

Sometimes system crashes while editing documents or malware may corrupt Office documents on your system. When Office fails to open a document that it opened previously or supports, you know that something is not right. While you could try a program like File Repair to recover data from corrupt documents, you can alternatively try to fix the issue by yourself, provided that the damaged documents are stored in docx, pptx or xlsx format on your hard drive.

Let me clear you that the following method will not bring back the document in its original form. What you may be able to do however is to extract contents like text or media from the document. Docx, xlsx and pptx files are archives that contain a number of files when extracted. We use this to our advantage to extract the contents of a damaged document to the system to see if the data we need to access is recoverable.

The simplest way to do when you have 7-Zip or a comparable archiving software installed on your system. If you do, all that needs to be done is to right-click the document and select 7-Zip > Extract to from the Windows Explorer context menu.

you can use another application or use the default Windows tool to extract archives you may need to rename the file extension of the document to .zip before you can extract the contents.

 

If the extraction is successful, you end up with a number of files and folders that you can browse. The important folders and files are:

• word > document.xml which contains the text of the Word docx document
• word > media which lists the media embedded in the Word document
• xl > worksheets > sheet[X].xml which contains the spreadsheet data of sheet X
• ppt > media which lists the media embedded in the PowerPoint presentation

Note: Trying to extract the contents of a corrupt Office document is definitely worth a try before you use third party software to recover the data. Note that the manual option described in this tutorial works under all operating systems, not only Windows. 

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About dadasdasdas

My name is Subha. I’m interested in computer science, music and literature. Computers first appeared in my life when I was fifteen. Then I had got my first computer. I remember myself thinking, that it was the best thing in the world. I was playing it whenever I could but some time later, I noticed that I could do a lot more things with the computer, for example programming. So, I have started my graduation in Computer. Later i have decided that I can spread my knowledge among peoples. So, I have started blogging.