It seems that I have done something to an important Word document which details my home contents for insurance. I have used this document for the past 9 years without mishap. Now whenever I attempt to open the document a message appears saying the document is “Read Only” and a blank Word document appears. I have tried going into the properties of the document file and unticking the “Read Only” box but this did not fix the problem, nor does renaming the file. How can I regain access to this file? The computer is running Windows XP with Office 2003.

Normally if you attempt to open a read only document it will open without any problems but will have the text (Read-Only) displayed in the title bar of the Word window, indicating that the document is read only. Then, if you try to save the document Word will open the Save As window allowing you to save the document under a different name, since the original file cannot be written to given the read only nature of the file. However, in your case the document is failing to load all together. This is not normal behaviour, which makes me think that the document may be corrupted rather than read only. This is supported by the fact that it seems the document is not read only, since you have checked the read only property is not set on the document file.

The best way to check whether the document is corrupt, or there is something wrong with Word on your computer preventing the document from opening, would be to copy the document to a thumb drive (or some kind of portable media) and attempt to open the file on another computer. In the event that the document does open, there is something wrong with the Word installation on your computer. In this situation I would recommend that you reinstall Word (or all of Microsoft Office) on your computer. However, in the more likely scenario that the document does not open on the other computer this strongly indicates that the document is corrupt.

Obviously a corrupt document is not ideal, since this document contains a rather important inventory of your home and contents insurance details. Therefore, our attention will now move to recovering the data from the file. In the first instance, if you have a backup of the file (such as a recent version of the file which is not corrupt) your best option would be to use this backup copy and then reconstruct any changes made between when that backup was taken and the current date. However, since you are so concerned about recovering this file I am working on the assumption that you do not have a viable backup (as a note for the future, make sure you do backup all important data frequently).

So, assuming that we need to recover this file we will try opening the document within Word, but through a special mode known as “Recover text from any file”. This is a useful mode of Word which will allow you to open any file type and recover text from within the file. Be aware, you will lose all formatting and other special features of the document when you do the recovery in this mode, but hopefully you should at least have all the text which was contained within. Open Word and then go to the “File” menu > “Open”. In the Open window that appears, in the “Files of type” drop-down menu select “Recover text from any file (*.*)”. Find the document you wish to recover, select the file and click the “Open” button. The document should open. At this point I strongly suggest that you save the recovered document under a different file name by going to the “File” menu > “Save As” and then work on this saved copy. This means that should you need to do the recovery again, because you made a mistake when cleaning-up the recovered document (e.g. deleted some text you should not have deleted) then you can do the recovery again on the original file as that has not been modified. More information on the “recover text from any file” feature in Word can be found at the Microsoft Knowledge Base article: support.microsoft.com/kb/290946 .