Why My MS Office Files Do Not Open?

While working on MS Office, there may be situations when you click and try to open up an office file, it does not open. After this you try the “Open With” option to open the required file and the file gets opened in other program rather than its respective program. For instance, an MS Word file might not open in MS Word and works effectively with any other program.

Why does this happen?
This situation generally occurs when the file association or file type extension is incorrect. To correct the problem, one must ensure to check and correct the file associations by “repairing the Office or Office program”, or by using the “regserver” command.


The Solutions:


Option 1:

Repair the Office or Office Program:

While repairing the Office program, the correct file association will be performed with the respective office program, to repair the Office program follow these steps:

1. First of all, close all the running Office programs and turn off any running anti-virus program.
2. Click the Start button and select the Run option.
3. In the Run window, type the following command: appwiz.cpl. This would open the Add or Remove Programs window.
4. Click the installed office program like, Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003 or Microsoft Office 2000 Professional etc.
5. Now click the Change/Remove option. The Microsoft Office 2003 Setup window will be displayed.
6. In the Setup window, select the Reinstall or Repair option. The program will now check for the installed files and will replace or install any files from the earlier version of Office which were of wrong size, damaged, corrupt or missing.
7. After repairing of the Office program, turn on the anti-virus program on your computer system.

The repairing of Office would make the program free from errors or any type of corruptions thus making the files accessible.

Option 2:

Use of “regserver” command to re-register the Office program

The regserver command is used re-register the Office program itself. This command is useful when you want to rewrite all the program registry keys and re-associate the programs with suitable program files. To perform this modification, follow these steps:

1. Close the program which has to be re-registered
2. Click the Start button and select the Run option.
3. In the Run window, type program.exe/unregserver in the box.
4. Again click Start and select the Run option and type program.exe/regserver in the box.

Note: This does not works for MS Outlook

These steps would re-register the Office program and the office files would open with their respective programs.


This article aims to provide you with solutions when you are unable to open a file or access its data because of unknown reasons. If in certain circumstances your MS Office file(s) gets corrupt or damaged you can recover your inaccessible data with the help of file repair software. The file repair software repairs the damaged file and makes it easy for you to access your data.

You can try the Kernel file repair range for word recovery, power point recovery, excel recovery, access recovery, and publisher recovery from the corrupt and damaged files. The file recovery software demo version is available for FREE download for the performance evaluation after which you can purchase FULL version of the file data recovery software.