How to Manually Repair Microsoft Office Documents with Office

Last Updated on September 2, 2016

Sometimes Microsoft Office documents get corrupted and won’t open. Here’s a look at how to repair them manually using Office itself.

Microsoft Office 365/2016 has a lot of advanced features that make it the most popular office suite out there. However, sometimes documents get corrupted and won’t open.

What you might not be aware of is you can use Office to repair those documents and not use a third-party utility to do it. The feature was introduced back in Office 2003. Here’s how it works.

Note: For this article, I am using Microsoft Word, but the process is similar in the rest of the programs in the suite, too.

Repair Office Documents

To start, launch Word (or any other Office program) and go to File > Open > Browse and then find the document you need to repair.

Next, select the dropdown in the lower right corner and select Open and Repair and wait for the process to complete.

Repair

It’s worth noting that Office will try to repair corrupt documents automatically, but at times you need to do it manually.

For more Office tips and tricks, make sure to check out our Microsoft Office archive.

2 Comments

venkat
which Microsoft office you are referring to. in Word 2007 there is no “file” menu nor “browse”. Am I missing something?
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Brian Burgess
Office 2016 is shown. It’s been years since I used 2007, but you should be able to browse to open a document and the option should be in the dropdown as shown in the screenshot above.
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