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.