What are the Common Reasons for Corrupt Office Files?

Microsoft is a big name in computer industry. It provides many software programs for different purposes. Microsoft Office suite is one of them. It is an immensely useful utility for desktop users. This Office suite contains various components, such as: Word for creating documents, PowerPoint for creating presentations, Excel for creating spreadsheets, Access for creating databases, Outlook for emailing purpose, and many more. It is one of the most popular software programs among computer users all around the world.

Where Office suite is considered as a resourceful application for desktop users, on the other hand it may create serious problems due to file corruption. No computer file is immune to corruption, so are the files created by Office components. Be it a Word document, PowerPoint presentation, Excel spreadsheet, Access database or Outlook data file, all are prone to corruption. Whenever a file becomes corrupt, it cannot be accessed by the program. Or, some part of the file might be missing, lost or contains invalid data.

Being an Office suite user, you must have faced corruption in your files. At that time, you might be wondering the reasons that caused corruption in your Office files. Corruption reasons are not specified always. There are various causes which are responsible to corrupt Office files. Some of the most common reasons are discussed below:

Virus Infection: This is one of the most common factors that frequently takes place. A computer virus or bug can perform many harmful activities which include file deletion or modification, infecting computer registry, changing volume labels, cross-linked files creation, etc. All these things are harmful for computer programs and their files. A virus or bug may directly attack to a folder or file to make it inaccessible.

Improper Shutdowns: Improper shutdowns are always harmful for both computer and its files. If a computer system gets abruptly shutdown while you are saving a file of any Office program, then there would be fair chances of corruption. The files do not get saved properly due to sudden system shutdowns.

System Crash: If your system crashes down while working on an Office program or a file is being saved, it may cause corruption. A system gets crashed down due to various factors, such as: programs are using conflicting memory, faulty hardware devices, etc.

Bad Sectors: A system hard disk is divided into multiple sectors at which computer data are stored. If a file is being saved on a bad sector of hard disk, the file will become corrupt or inaccessible for sure. A computer machine is unable to identify the bad sectors, it only searches for a sector on hard disk to save the data. Physical damage is mainly responsible for bad sectors in a hard disk.

Hardware Failures: Problems and failures in hardware devices take place if they are faulty. It may affect the performance of a computer system and may create many other issues which can cause data inaccessibility or file corruption.

Software Malfunction: Software malfunction refers to a situation when a software program does not act properly. And due to this, it starts crashing down in a frequent manner. The main reason behind software malfunction is the collision between one program to other.

Any of these reasons can cause corruption in Microsoft Office files. In minor corruption cases, data from a corrupt Office file can be retrieved. Luckily, Microsoft Office programs contain a built-in repair feature that can repair Office files and open them, but that would only be possible if corruption is minor, i.e. not severe.

• Microsoft Word document can be repaired using Open and Repair feature.
• Microsoft Excel spreadsheet can be repaired using Open and Repair feature.
• Microsoft PowerPoint presentation can be repaired using Open and Repair feature.
• Microsoft Access database can be repaired using Compact and Repair feature.
• Microsoft Outlook data file can be repaired using scanpst.exe, the Inbox Repair tool.