Is my document hosed?
February 7, 2010 2:31 PM   Subscribe

Word 2007 freakout: Is my document hosed?

I have a 2.8 MB Word 2007 document comprising of 80 to 100 embedded jpegs. (Perhaps this is foolhardy.) After long use, when I now open this document, only the first 24 pictures are displayed. The next picture area has replacement text reading "The image part with relationship ID rId25 was not found in the file." And all the picture slots after that read the same except saying rId26, rId27, and so on.

Is my document hosed?
posted by Joe Beese to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)
 
Is it a true 2007 document (does it have a .docx extension instead of the older .doc) ?

.docx is just a load of XML and your images stored inside a standard .zip file. You might find that your images are still in the file, just the information pointing to them is corrupt.

If it is a .docx take a copy of the file and rename it to .zip. You'll get a warning from Windows about changing the file type, this is okay.

If you have file extensions hidden, you'll need to change the Windows option to display them:
[Organize -> Folder and search options -> View -> Untick: Hide extensions for known file types]

You'll then be able to open the .zip file with your zip opening tool of choice. Inside, open the word\media folder - you'll find a set of images in there. Hopefully all of the missing images will still be there, if so you can copy them to a safe location and recreate the document.

Good luck!
posted by hjd at 3:04 PM on February 7, 2010


I have a 2.8 MB Word 2007 document ... Is my document hosed?

Word is pretty notorious for causing random breakage in large documents. OpenOffice.org Writer is pretty well regarded for not doing that. Once you've dug the pictures out as hjd suggests, consider using oowriter as your tool for recreating it.
posted by flabdablet at 5:54 PM on February 7, 2010


Try the following:

1) Start Word but do not open the document.

2) Go to Office Button -> Open.

3) A dialog box will pop up; on its left-hand side, you should see a folder called "Trusted Templates." Click it.

4) Delete the file "Normal.dotm" (or, if you have made changes to your default document template and want to be sure they aren't lost, cut-and-paste it to your desktop or something... and if you don't know, then you probably never made changes to it and it's safe tp delete the file).

5) Close Word, then open it again.

6) Attempt to open the file with all the JPEGs and see what happens. (If you get the same problem, and if you cut-and-pasted the .dotm file instead of deleting it, you can put it back where it was.)

Often, when Word seems to be screwing up documents that used to work, it's as a result of the default document template being altered in some mysterious way. Deleting the file forces Word to re-create it from the installation default.
posted by AugieAugustus at 6:23 AM on February 8, 2010


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