How to repair Word document which displays square boxes instead of text

Microsoft Word is an extensively used text editor in the world, which comes equipped with lots of useful and easy-to-use features. It empowers the end users to create, format and modify all types of documents. But, Microsoft Word application has its own share of problems. Many-a-times you won't be able to open a specific document or even if you open the document, you would get junk characters instead of text. These symptoms are good enough to tell that a document has become corrupt. A Word document is very much prone to corruption due to factors like abrupt system shutdown, application malfunction, power outages and others. In such scenarios, it becomes essential to recover inaccessible text or information from a corrupt Word document. This can be done by recovering data from a backup copy of the document. If there is no backup available then you can employ various Word repair strategies, like Open and Repair feature among others, to overcome the problem.

Consider a scenario, wherein you have a very important business document saved as a .doc file on your system. You have received this file via an e-mail from one of your colleagues. When you try and open the file to read its content, you could not see anything but square boxes. Since this file holds great significance, you would like to recover its text as soon as possible.

Cause

The strange behavior depicted by the document indicates that the Word file is corrupt. The document could have got corrupted during downloading only. Therefore, you can try downloading it again. If it doesn't help, then consider the steps given in the 'Resolution' section of this article.

Resolution

In order to fix the issue with the document, you must try the following Word recovery steps:

• Use Open and Repair feature to open the damaged corrupt document
• Save the document in another file format, and then convert it back to Word
• Start Windows in safe mode
• Change the template that is used by the document
• Change printer drivers
• Rename the global template
• Start word using default settings

If you are unable to repair a Word document even after observing the aforementioned steps, then you must download a third-party Word repair software from the Internet. Such tools repair corrupt Word files and employ improved scanning algorithms to recover data.