Have you ever opened a Word document, only to be met with an error message that says “Word found unreadable content”? The full error message is below.
Word found unreadable content in Document. Do you want to recover the contents of this document? If you trust the source of this document, click Yes.
The error message sounds like the document is lost, and you know how frustrating it can be, especially if you have important information saved in the document. Though the error sounds cryptic and catastrophic, it is a very common error for many who use Word regularly.
There are a variety of reasons why you might see this error. These reasons include but are not limited to not saving the document file before closing, sudden power loss while the document is still open or saving, Word program crash, etc.
In this guide, let me show you three ways to fix the ‘Word found unreadable content’ error and recover the document.
Table of contents:
Fix the ‘Word found unreadable content’ error
The ‘Word found unreadable content’ means that the Word program is unable to read some or all the content of the document file you are trying to open. To fix the error, you have to try and repair the document. Thankfully, Word has built-in options to recover unreadable documents. Let me show you how to do it.
Note: Before proceeding, create a duplicate copy of the document just in case.
1. Click ‘Yes’ in the error message
When you see the error message while opening the Word document, click the “Yes” button. This action prompts the Word program to try and recover the content as much as possible. The recovery content includes document formatting, tables, media, etc. Once recovered, Word opens the document file normally.
After that, you can save the document normally or copy all the content to a new document if everything is ok.
2. Use the ‘Open and Repair’ option
Word has a built-in repair option called “Open and Repair,” used for opening, repairing, and recovering corrupted documents. The good thing is, with this option, Word recovers all the formatting, tables, images, media, and more in the Word document. Here’s how to use it when you see the ‘Word found unreadable content in document’ error.
- Open the Word application.
- Click the File option.
- Go to the Open tab on the sidebar.
- Click the Browse button.
- Select the file in the browse window.
- Click the dropdown icon next to Open.
- Select the Open and Repair option.
- With that, Word will repair and opens the document.
- Next, save the document or copy the document content to a new file.
- With that, the ‘Word found unreadable content’ is fixed.
Once the document is recovered, I recommend you re-save the file or copy all the content to a new Word document. That way, when you open the file, you will no longer encounter the ‘Word found unreadable content’ error.
3. Use the ‘Recover text from any file’ option
You can also try the ‘Recover text from any file’ option to fix the ‘Word found unreadable content’ problem. This is especially useful if the ‘Open and Repair’ option does not work.
- Open the Word application.
- Click the File option.
- Go to the Open tab on the sidebar.
- Click the Browse button.
- Choose “Recover text from any file” from the File Type dropdown.
- Select the file in the browse window.
- Click the Open button.
- With that, Word will repair and opens the document.
- Next, save the document or copy the document content to a new file.
- With that, the ‘Word found unreadable content’ is fixed.
One thing to remember while following this method is that it is pretty limited in terms of what it can recover. i.e., this method cannot recover things like formatting, media files, drawings, etc. However, it will recover all the basic stuff like headers, footers, body, tables, notes, etc.
Word found unreadable content — Conclusion
As you can see, if you ever face the ‘Word found unreadable content’ problem, you have three ways to fix it and recover data from the Word document file. You can use any of the three methods. However, the ‘Recover text from any file’ method will not recover extra stuff like document formatting, media content, drawings, attachments, etc.
Also, don’t forget to create a backup copy of the Word document before trying to recover it. That way, even if something happens to the duplicate file, you’ll have the original to work with.
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That is all. It is that simple to fix the ‘Word found unreadable content’ error in the Word application.
I hope this simple and easy Windows how-to guide helped you.
If you are stuck or need help, email me, and I will try to help as much as possible.
