Computers are infamous for causing more frustration than they relieve. Perhaps nothing could be more frustrating than entering all the crucial information you need in a Word document, saving it, and then discovering it became corrupted when you next go to open it.

Ways to recover Word documents are numerous, but few of them actually retrieve the full, correct text. Still, it’s definitely worth a try when you have hours of work or research invested into a Word file.

First, you can try opening the document in Microsoft Word. If it will open, try saving it to a .txt or .rtf file, then save it as a Word document again.

If this still doesn’t work, open the document using the File > Open dialog. Before you open it, click the arrow next to Open and click Open and Repair instead. Microsoft Word will try to recover the document on its own.

The next thing to try is closing Word, then going to Start > Run and typing in winword /a. Press Enter and wait for a few seconds while Word opens again. Using this new copy of Word, try to open the document and see if it will retrieve the Word file contents.

If this doesn’t work, try creating a new document, then clicking Insert > File and selecting the corrupted file. It might insert the corrupted Word file contents correctly.

The last thing you can try is clicking File > Open and selecting Recover Text from Any File (*.*). Follow the instructions and see if this recovers the Word text.

If nothing will work, look for a specialized data recovery software, which is often able to recover the corrupted file in full or in part. This saves you hours of work retyping that valuable corrupted Word document.