Symptom:

When opening a damaged Word document with Microsoft Word, a “File Conversion” dialog will pop up and ask you to select the encoding that makes your document readable:

File Conversion Dialog

However, whatever encoding you select, the original contents of the document will never be recovered.

Precise Explanation:

When the encoding information in the Word document are corrupt or lost, Word will not be able to decode the contents in the document. So it will pop up the file conversion dialog and ask for the correct encoding. And due to the corruption of the file structure and other contents, even if you select the correct encoding, Word still not be able to decode the contents properly, which renders an unreadable and useless document. In such a case, you can use our product DataNumen Word Repair to repair the Word document and solve this error.

Sample File:

Sample corrupt Word document file that will cause the error. Error7_1.doc

The file repaired with DataNumen Word Repair: Error7_1_fixed.doc