Corrupt Word Documents - Word 2003

I have been given a handful of corrupt word documents to see whether they can be repaired.

When opening them within Word 2003, they fail to open at all with no real useful suggestion by Word as to what to do next.

I discovered Word has a limited inbuilt recovery functionality which helped with all the corrupt files in question.

You need to select FILE/OPEN then single click on the file in question and then select "Open and Repair" from the dropdown menu of the Open dialog box in the bottom right corner.

Word 2003 will then attempt to open the file, repair errors and notify you of the them allowing you to resave the document. Note that there may be things missing or lost such as formatting in the recovery process.