Microsoft Word 2007 Office Open XML Error
December 28th, 2007
Unfortunately, there’s a random Office Open XML error that can really cripple your work and it seems I’m not the only one to experience the problem.
For a couple months, I’d been working on a new ebook. It had about 58 pages of text formatted with about 30 screen captures and images used throughout. In other words, it was a highly customized Word 2007 document which I diligently saved while working on it — I even saved various versions as I went along.
Nothing was out of the ordinary; my computer was chugging along swimmingly and Word confirmed each save as complete. There was no reason for me to believe I’d have problems in the future.
Little did I know that actually saving the document wouldn’t help, because when I went to work on the file again I was greeted by some obscure and unhelpful XML error.
The Office Open XML file xxx.docx cannot be opened because their are problems with its contents.
Details
Unspecified error
Location: /part/document.xml, Line: 2, Column: 259439
Well, looking at that error message, that was helpful. (Please sense the sarcasm in that last sentence.)
After a bit of Googling, I came across others who were experiencing the problem and some tips to try. I tried them all, but none of them worked — not even the repair document. In previous versions of Word, even though I never experienced such a problem, if a document was corrupt, running a quick repair usually cleared the problem up or gave me the content in some other form which could used to create a new document.
Finally, I came across another thread which appeared to lend me some hope of solving the problem, but I was let down yet again. After changing the file extension from .docx to .zip and opening it up with WinZip, I was able to open up the /word/document.xml file and guess what was at Line: 2, Column: 259439? A closing bracket. That’s it.
I opened up the file in the XML editor and even Dreamweaver and neither found any coding errors — all the tags were closed and no apostrophes or quotes were out of place. I even went so far as to try and open the XML file in Word itself (since it has a built-in XML editor) and I received another error, this time on a different line/column, same closing bracket though.
What really burns me about this is there’s no simple fix for the consumer. A consumer should not need to know how to write XML or what an XML document is to correct an "unspecified error". And should such an error occur, there should be some way to at least skip the problem portion of the file to recover the rest of the document. Even if it’s not complete, there should be a way to recover enough of the content to start a new document without needing to involve Microsoft support — which you need to pay for after 90 days.
So, this entry should serve as a warning to any other Office/Word 2007 users — there is no guarantee that by saving your document regularly that you won’t encounter this error and there is no quick or easy fix. Your data will be lost unless you can send it to Microsoft, understand how to deconstruct an Office Open XML document, or a miracle happens.
The conclusion I’ve come to is that it’s best to save your documents in at least 2 different formats at regular intervals. One of the formats will be the word document format, of course, and the other format should be platform independent such as HTML. As a rule now, I make sure to save all my Word documents as an HTML document which I could easily edit in Dreamweaver should something actually happen and Office Open XML chokes again.
#1 WP Affiliate Guide is Hustling and Bustling - alternativeSOHO wrote…
January 18th, 2008 at 2:53 pm[...] the way, the WP Affiliate Guide ebook was what I was working on when the Microsoft Open XML error reared its ugly [...]
#2 Simon wrote…
April 8th, 2008 at 6:36 amI have just solved the same problem, hundred and hundereds unecessary table tags needed deleting. In the end I took a chance and emailed it to a colleague with Word 2003, they downloaded the expansion pack to enable them to read the document. The document could be read ok in Word 03 then saved as a readable .doc file. When Word 03 saved the file as a .docx the file remained unreadable!
When the .doc file is opened in Word 07 and saved as a .docx file the resulting file is unreadable. So for the moment I will stick with the old format .doc file.
#3 Simon Thoume wrote…
April 15th, 2008 at 11:31 pmI have the same problem with the unspecified error and i was able to do the same thing you said by changing the file from a .docx to a .zip opened the file word then document.xml but i don’t know how to find where the error is. My unspecified error is Line:2 Column:372 199. Do you think you could explain to me how i would go about finding that on the page?
Thanks
#4 Juan Cieri wrote…
April 19th, 2008 at 8:33 amHi, I had this problem too. I used VSTO for creating some automated word templates. While opening the saved document, an annoying message appeared: “Unspecified error [...] Location: /part/document.xml, Line: 2, Column: 304943″. After analyzing the XML tags, it ocurred to me that a content control was causing all the pain. This content control was in a 3-level table (3 nested tables). Also, it stored multiple lines (for example, it stored a string “This is \n a content \n control”. For this string to be showed in multiple lines, the option “Allow carriage returns (multiple paragraphs” in content control preferences was checked.
After unckecking the “multiple paragraphs” option the problem disappeared. The document also seems to be consistent again. Until now, I couldn’t manage to use multiple line content controls in my 3-level tables. Could this be a bug in Word 2007?
In my case, this is a very particular problem. But just wanted to share this with you because it took me so long to solve it. Hope this can help you out (if you still have this problem).
Regards!
Juan
#5 Teli wrote…
April 23rd, 2008 at 2:26 pmBased on all the feedback I’m seeing here (along with my own circumstances), it does appear to be a bug with table handling. I was only able to resolve the error by completely deleting the tables from the .xml document directly.
Juan, I may have lost you somewhere in the flow of your comments as I have no idea where you’re referencing the “multiple paragraphs” option. Is this something that needs to be handled before attempting to open the document or something that’s handled through directly editing the XML file? It could save some time (and data) should I or others ever encounter this problem again (knocking on wood).
~ Teli
#6 Teli wrote…
April 23rd, 2008 at 2:33 pmSimon,
Unfortunately, it’s not as easy as saying “go here and do this”, which is why this is such a bad move on Microsoft’s part. The error message provided is unhelpful as the cause usually doesn’t exist at the line/column listed in the message and for someone who doesn’t understand XML, it’s just Greek anyway.
Had I not had some form of XML knowledge, I would have been completely and utterly lost (in fact, I pretty much was and it was only through sheer trial and error that I was able to narrow it down to the tables which were causing the problem and knowing how to properly delete the offending content without further damage).
My recommendation, if at all possible, is to try Juan’s solution (hoping he pops back in to clarify), bribe an XML savvy colleague, or e-mail Microsoft technical support and have them sort out the problem for you.
Sorry it’s not much help.
~ Teli
#7 Ecnassianer wrote…
May 5th, 2008 at 1:39 pmHey Teli,
I know you’ve mentioned that using your fix isn’t a “go here and do this” method, but I was wondering if you could throw out a few more hints. I’ve worked with XML in a professional environment before and I’m confident I can sort out the fuzzy parts, but any tips to speed up the process would be appreciated.
Thanks.
#8 Mike747 wrote…
May 30th, 2008 at 10:45 amI have been working on a book for months and this just occurred. I thought I was safe since I just backed it up earlier this week, but that copy had the same problem. I emailed the docx file to a Word 2003 system and it loaded fine. I saved it as a doc file and emailed it back. It looks good now. I guess there is something in the structure of doc that is causing a bug. Now, I have to just work in doc format only.
#9 Juan Cieri wrote…
June 24th, 2008 at 9:36 pmHi Teli, I apologize for the delay. My reply was related with content controls in Word 2007. However, I found that there is a problem when a plain text content control contains multiple lines (lines with strings like: “I love \n working in \n Word 2007″). In my case, I was able to recover original files by just deleting the content control from the xml document (manually). However, you never talked about content controls, so the problem should be anywhere else..
I think it would be helpful if you show us some of the xml where the problem resides (Location: /part/document.xml, Line: 2, Column: 259439). As Ecnassianer suggests, it would be easier for us to help you.
Regards,
Juan
#10 Travis wrote…
July 30th, 2008 at 12:39 pmMy problem occured in documents that included charts created in a seperate Excel 2007 document. In the Word Document I created a bunch of Text Tables, then I pasted the charts in those tables (easiest way I know of to have multiple charts side by side, and on top of each other). For some reason, these documents would corrupt randomly. Fortunately, I had saved other versions, so I was able to recover that way, otherwise I would have to pay for one of those recovery programs.
#11 Teli wrote…
September 8th, 2008 at 4:57 pmHi Juan,
It does seem like we’re playing with months as opposed to days with replying to one another. LOL
I’ve already corrected my problem (I had to delete some tables from my document.xml file). It appears that Ecnaissier is the one experiencing a similar problem, however, I don’t know quite how to instruct him. It’s why I asked you for some clarification, basically a step by step on how to remove the content controls.
~ Teli
#12 Pankaj wrote…
October 20th, 2008 at 10:43 pmEven one of my colleagues was facing the same problem. She mailed the file to me and i was able to open the file in Office 2003. I sent the file back to her which had *.doc extension and she was able to open the file on her machine which had office 2007. I tried to get to the source of the problem but couldn’t. But i have very little knowledge of XML. So as they say people with less knowledge of xml could be in a problem as it means days of work lost. Hope we find a logical solution to his soon.
Cheers and Happt diwali to the rest of the world
#13 blue_socks wrote…
December 9th, 2008 at 3:43 pmHi
i’m desperate as i need my notes that for the first and only time i didnt back up for an exam tomorrow!
i’ve tried sending the document to people with office 2003 so they can open it as a doc instead n it doesnt seem to be working. how can they open it? how can they conver the docx instantly???
and i also tried the zipping method, and i still cant make any sense of it…what and where i have to look. unfortunately i havent got the time to be playing around…
another friend has suggested a document regenerator that is taking about 2hrs to ’scan’ my computer. i’m not too sure of the results that i will get, but if not for tomorrow, at least for the sake of having my notes back. how can i get it opened on office 2003 as a doc???? where should i change the extension?
Thanks for all the guidelines…
#14 Lehauli wrote…
January 12th, 2009 at 9:34 amI have the same bloody problem with a word document full of equations and it would not open again. It just gives me the same useless report about a “/word/document.xml line 2…” which cannot be opened. There must a procedure to correct it?
Thanx in advance!!!
#15 Andy wrote…
January 22nd, 2009 at 2:34 pmRemove the update KB956358 from Add/Remove programs it fixed my issues I had with this error.
#16 Tom wrote…
January 26th, 2009 at 2:28 amI just wanted to say thanks. I had the same problem and unless someone had given me that clue about embedded stuff, I never would’ve figured out that I needed to excise a broken chart. Pretty garbage way of handling things.
#17 David Balslev-Clausen wrote…
March 19th, 2009 at 5:00 amHi guyes
I had a similar problem – mine being a subdocument giving problems:
1. changed the extension of the file from .docx -> .zip
2. Opened the archive and found the word/document.xml file using n++
3. went to the indicated location of the error (being a subdocument)
4. deleted this xml command giving problems something like
5. changed the extension of the zip-file back to .docx
Voila
cheers to all
#18 addpoint wrote…
March 20th, 2009 at 8:45 amI had this problem, and found that a content control had snuck itself inside another control. The problem disappeared when the inner content control was removed.