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I have a 60,000 word document which contains a fair amount of formatting - in particular it contains many:

  • Pictures
  • tables
  • numbered lists
  • bullet-point lists
  • sections/subsections/sub-sub sections
  • bold/italic

It does not contain (and will never need to contain) any hyperlinks

Unfortunately the file has become "slightly" corrupted. There are a minefield of hidden codes that have been turned on and off and this is starting to be a drag. I need to somehow clean up the file. One thing in particular is that there appear to be some hyperlinks that have become mangled. I don't see them in the main document at all, but if I cut sections of the document and paste it in another empty document then suddenly hyperlinks appear out of nowhere.

One idea I had was to somehow transfer the file to another format, or another word processor with fewer features, or at least without hyperlinks and then copy it back. Any suggestions what format/other software would be suitable. Can anyone suggest any alternative solutions?

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  • Office 2007 is all xml underneath. You could look through it. Use backups :)
    – Fantomas
    Nov 28, 2010 at 0:49

1 Answer 1

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What version of word ?

Save the file in RTF format, and then shut down word (and outlook if you have it open).

Then open the newly saved RTF version of the file and see how it looks.

It it seems OK, then save this in DOC format again (but keep the original broken document for a long time, just in case).

I've done this cycle-through-RTF fix many times over the years to rescue broken Word documents. It is not foolproof but does seem to sort out about 90% of strange things that happen.

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