Microsoft Word cannot Open

23
2013-11
  • Andreas Rejbrand

    I solved my Save problem by deleting one formula and illustration at a time to find out which one was causing the document to be corrupt, and then I redraw the offending illustration, and I could save it.

    Since that day, I have worked a lot with my documents, and almost once a day, at least one file gets corrupt and I cannot save it. [I cannot believe that Word is this buggy, but apparently I am the only one using Word to write long, technical, documents, and thus the only one to see these bugs.]

    Anyhow, I can live with this. I have learned to Ctrl+S once a minute, and when it fails, I simply close without saving and open the last saved version of the document, and rewrite the new material I wrote the last minute.

    But now I have an even worse problem: One of my long documents won't even open!

    Word suddenly cannot open the document

    The dialog says, "The file %s cannot be opened since there is a problem with its content. Information: The name in the ending tag of the element has to match the element type of the starting tag. Place %s Part %s,, Row: %d,, Column %d"

    The document is more than 40 pages long, and I have spent many weeks working on it. It contains a lot of formulae, illustrations, footnotes, bibliography, cross references, etc. Don't tell me I have to redo everything. Is there anything I can do?

    • Answers
  • The_Fox

    I can think of two things:

    1. Try to open the document in Word with the option to repair it. In Word 2007 you have an arrow next to the Open button where you can select Open and repair. Word 2010 probably has the same.
    2. You can try to rename .docx to .zip and then open /word/document.xml (the new Office XML files are just zip-files). Maybe you can fix the problem in the xml file yourself. Make a copy first!
  • Joseph Redfern

    Apart from the things The_Fox mentioned, I would try opening the file in OpenOffice (or LibreOffice... same thing, really). It might have more of a tolerance for imperfect files.

    I would also make a backup of the file, so that it can't get any more damaged/modified.


    • Related Question

    Microsoft Word cannot Save
  • Andreas Rejbrand

    I use Microsoft Word 2010 to write long documents. These typically include a lot of sections, graphics, formulae, footnotes, a TOC, an index, a bibliography, and inline cross-references and source references. Hence, I make full use of the (mostly) excellent functionality offered by the Microsoft Word word processor.

    However, far too often (maybe once a day) when I try to save a document (Ctrl+S) after a few minutes of editing, the "Save As" dialog appears (which is unexpected, since the document is already saved as a file). And, then, no matter if I choose to overwrite the existing file, or to save as a new file, which are my only options, it fails with error message "A file error occurred" [translated from Swedish: "Ett filfel uppstod"]. Thus, I cannot save the document anymore!

    Screenshot of error message

    Is there any known cure? I have experienced this problem since Word 2007. Now I use Word 2010. [This never happened to me when writing equally complex documents in Word 97 and Word 2003, which are stable as rocks.]

    The only workaround that I know of is to copy the text to Notepad, create a new Word document, and spend a few hours reformatting it and recreating all formulae, illustrations, etc.

    Some clarification

    This has happened for a very long time, and with many different documents. And on different computers. My hypothesis is that Word is buggy, and that formulae and Word illustrations sometimes "mess up" the document so that it cannot be saved any more.

    I just removed all equations and illustrations from the file, and then it was possible to save it. But when I undo (so that the equations and illustrations come back), I can no longer save. We are talking about many, many hours of work, so I am a bit annoyed...

    Problem solved!

    The problem was an illustration, the removal (and recreation) of which resolved the issue:

    The problem


    • Related Answers
  • horatio

    This sounds like you are losing access to the hard drive. I have not encountered this in Word, but I have had a disappearing network share cause this issue with DTP programs. I would take a careful look at your hardware and especially your system events in the event viewer

  • Marko

    I encountered the same problem and found an easy answer.

    • First, open a new word file. (Let's call it file B).
    • Second, cut the part that prevents you from saving from the original file, say file A.
    • Third, paste part from file A to file B.
    • Fourth, save file B as ms word 1997-2003 format. It might say that you lose some information bla bla... just ignore and save (trust me on this).
    • Fifth, once saving file B is done, copy from file B and paste it on file A on the original place in file A.

    Then, save file A normally as word 2007 document.

    1. You will notice that lost features in file B is revived in file A.

    2. Now, file A saves without bugs.

    Doing this seems to eliminates buggy parts from file A.