In all likelihood, then, the Word message reflects some corruption of the document. You could try opening the file with the 'Open and Repair' function (available via File|Open> select file, then clicking on the 'open' dropdown. If that doesn't work and you have a backup (which you should have), you may need to restore that. Alternatively, you can try recovering the text content using Word's 'Recover text from any file' option (available via File|Open> Files of type).

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Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]