If so, there is a strong likelihood that the document has been corrupted, perhaps beyond repair. Working from within Word on documents that are on mobile media including flash drives is probably the most frequent cause of document corruption left.

Working from within Word on a document means:

• Opening the document
• Editing the document
• Saving the document
• Printing the document

Note that printing the document from Windows will invoke Word.


This seems to be because Word documents are comprised of many components and not all of them necessarily get properly saved. Even printing a Word document can make changes to the document.



The best course with documents on mobile media (and in emails) is to copy the document to your local hard drive. Work on it there. Then, if you want, with Word closed, copy it back to the mobile media (or attach to an email).


I have heard of similar problems with some (but not all) cloud services.


I guess one other possibility to attempt some kind of recovery would be to see what is in the XML. Make a copy of your document and add the .zip extension after .docx so it is mydoc.docx.zip. Then you should be able to open it in Windows and see the parts. If you do not have an XML editor, you can change the .xml extension to .txt and use Notepad.



Your text would be in the document.xml file in the word folder inside that zip. It will be a mess. It almost certainly would be easier to reconstruct it than to recover it this way.