Correct a corrupt document

Scenario

If you run a comparison with a corrupt Word document (DOCX, DOC, RTF), you may experience one or more of the following issues:

The documents fail to compare. Additionally the resulting RTF crashes Microsoft Word or is 0 bytes.
The redline fails to load or does not behave as expected.

In many cases, correcting the document resolves the issue.

Note: To learn more about about document corruption, visit Microsoft's site.

Resolution

If you have any clean-up/conversion software (e.g. Microsystems DocXTools), you can run it. If you don't, follow the steps below to manually clean up the document.

1. Repair the document

Open Microsoft Word.
Go to File > Open.
Browse to the corrupt document. Select the document, but don't open it yet.
On the Open button, click the down arrow and select Open and Repair.

Note: If the Show Repairs dialog appears, close it.

Save the repaired document with a new name. Run a comparison with the repaired document to see if the issue persists.

2. Apply the Normal style

Open the document in Microsoft Word.
Apply the Normal style to all text in the document:
1. Highlight all the text in the document (Ctrl + A).
2. Click the Home tab.
3. In the Styles group, click the More arrow.

Click Clear Formatting. The Normal style is applied.
Double-click the Header or Footer.
Delete any items (such as pictures or objects) from the Header and Footer.
Clear the formatting for any text in the Header and Footer by following steps c and d.

Delete all styles from the document.
Delete all fields from the document:
1. Click the Home tab.
2. In the Editing group, click Replace. Find and Replace opens.
3. In Find what, type ^d.
4. Leave Replace with blank.
5. Click Replace All.

Remove any directly applied character formatting:
1. Select all text (Ctrl + A).
2. Remove the formatting (Ctrl + Space).
Re-apply the correct language proofing:
1. Select all text (Ctrl + A).
2. Click the Review tab.
3. In the Language group, click Language and select Set Proofing Language.
4. Choose your proofing language.
5. Click OK.
Convert any tables to text.
Copy all text except for the last paragraph marker and paste it into a new document as unformatted text:
1. Go to the end of the document (Ctrl + End).
2. Select all text before this part (Ctrl + Shift + Home).
3. Copy it (Ctrl + C).
4. Create a new document (Ctrl + N).
5. In the new document, right click and select the Keep Text Only paste option.
Re-apply any styles you'd like to keep.
Save the document.
Run a comparison with the new document to see if the issue's resolved.