Hi,

Thanks in advance for any help:

My computer has been playing up and I struggled to close a Word file. Once I had closed it, I went to open it again and got this message:

The file_____ cannot be opened because there are problems with the contents

Details: An attribute value must not contain ","

I have tried a number of the free or trial Word repair and recovery tools but none have been able to recover more than about 4-5 pages before it all looks like code.

From these attempts I can see where it all goes wrong. I have also found someone offering a manual fix (but I am not able to totally understand it):

Manual Fix
Notepad ++ is a good, free editor for this type of task
· Make a copy of the file
· Rename the copy from DOCX to ZIP
· Open … .ZIP/word/document.xml in notepad
· Copy the contents of the file to clipboard
· Open Word
· Paste a copy of the copied XML into Word
· (optional) the XML is one long string too hard to read, you can replace some tags, with that tag plus a para mark to break up the text to make it more people readable.
· Open an XML validator, ie this site on the internet: http://www.w3schools.com/xml/xml_validator.asp
· Paste another copy of the XML into the “Syntax Check Your XML” input window
· Click on “validate” button
· Copy the missing tag, ie </mc:Fallback> (yours will be different)
· Return to word Find: mc:Fallback> (without the </ so you find both open and closing tags). Repeat find until you hit 2 open tags in a row. Then you just have to figure out where to put the closing tag between them. Look for other tags before and after a proper closing tag so you can match the problem area to a good area.