Repair Office Word Documents Using Office 365/Office 2016

Microsoft Office is certainly the most advanced productivity suite out there for computer as well as smartphone operating systems. While it’s true that most users never use advanced options, there are some lesser known feature that most users are not aware of.

When it comes to repairing a damaged document, most users prefer using third-party tools. Very few third-party document repairing tools are actually free and most of them have size limitations.

Open and repair feature in Microsoft Office

Very few PC and Office users are aware about Microsoft Office program’s ability to repair damaged documents. If you’re wondering if this document repairing feature is specific to Office 2016 and Office 365, you will be surprised to know that the feature is present in earlier versions of Office such as Office 2003, Office 2007, Office 2010 and Office 2013 as well. And the best part is, the feature actually works.

With the help of this handy feature, one can repair all document types supported by Microsoft Office. In short, you can repair documents created by Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and other applications of Office.

You can consider a document is damaged or corrupted when a document exhibit one of the following behaviour:

# Unreadable characters

# Error while opening the document

# Error while saving the document

# PC hangs or stops responding while opening the document

# Repeated redoes and page breaks

According to Microsoft, Microsoft Office automatically tries to repair a document if it detects a problem with the document which you’re trying to open using Microsoft Office program. However, at times, you might want to manually open and repair a document.

Use Microsoft Office to repair documents in Windows

Step 1: Launch Office Word, Excel or any other program that supports the document that want to repair. That is, if you have a .docx file, open Word program and if you have a .pptx file, you need to open Office PowerPoint.

Step 2: Now, click the File menu and then click Open option.

Step 3: When you see the following screen, click Browse button.

Step 4: Browse to the document which you want to repair, select it, and then click the small down arrow button adjacent to the Open button as shown in the picture below.

Step 5: Click Open and repair option to open the document and repair it. Simple as that!