How to repair corrupted files on Windows 10?

You can try changing the file extension. This is a simple manual workaround that can serve as a quick repair corrupted files and also allow you to extract readable text content from partially corrupted Word and Excel documents.

How to Repair Corrupted Files

Step 1: Right-click the corrupted file, select Copy, and then select Paste to copy the file.

Step 2: Right-click the copied file and select Rename.

Step 3: Change the file extension from .docx to .zip, or from .xlsx to .zip.

Step 4: When Windows displays a confirmation prompt for the extension change, click Yes.

Step 5: Double-click the generated .zip archive to open it.

Step 6: Locate the word folder for Word files or the xl folder for Excel files.

Step 7: In the corresponding folder, locate document.xml for Word or sharedStrings.xml for Excel.

Step 8: Open the target XML file using a web browser or Notepad.

Finally, if readable text appears, copy the content and paste it into a brand-new, blank Office document.

You can try to repair damaged files by manually extracting the data. For users who want to recover text content from moderately damaged .docx or .xlsx files, this is a DIY workaround to be used as a last resort.