Word won’t let me open a DOCX, the reasons and their solution

In principle, we could consider it as the text editor par excellence, we are talking about the program that is part of the Microsoft Office suite , Word. We find ourselves with a powerful application focused on working on these contents, but plagued with additional functions that make its enormous success worthwhile.

In fact, it could be said that this is a program that is installed on most computers around the world. However, despite all the features that it presents us by default, it is not an application free of errors on certain occasions. Considering that here we are dealing with a solution that many use constantly, both at home and at work, if it cannot be opened, a major problem occurs.

Word won't let me open a DOCX

There are certain occasions in which we are about to open a document in our own or third party’s DOCX format, which by the way is the default format of Word, but the program crashes. This means that when you try to open to view the content of the text file in a conventional way, for example, by double-clicking on it, the Office program does not open and crashes . Precisely for all this, below we are going to talk about some of the reasons why this can occur. This way we can avoid them or solve the issue in another way.

opciones word

We are using an incompatible version of Word

It is more than likely that most of you are very familiar with the DOC file format. Well, for those of you who don’t know, we will tell you that the DOCX are the updated and improved version of these files. However, if we use older versions of the Microsoft text editor, we may have problems opening the most current formats. Obviously this could lead to a blockage of the program as such and we would not be able to access the content of the file. In this situation, it is advisable to update the program or use any other compatible text editor to open the file.

The DOCX is too large

There are times when the Word document that we are talking about now has a higher weight than usual. This means that its size is larger than what we are used to due, among other reasons, to the additional content that we have added to the text as such. And it is that this type of documents that we create in the editor are capable of also including all kinds of photos and even videos.

To all this we can add the integration of graphs, tables and similar elements. Therefore, if our computer is somewhat limited in terms of RAM and CPU hardware specifications, Word may crash when trying to open them. We can always try another PC or application to see if things improve.

The content of the text file is corrupt

Whether due to improper use or a virus attack , among other reasons, it may be the case that the file and its content are corrupted. This is a slightly more complicated situation than the ones mentioned above and it leads us to not being able to access the texts stored in that DOCX file. At this point we will be forced to try to solve the problem with special programs as in the case of Remo Repair Word .