My brother just lost a 20 page Word document that he needs for Monday. He says he saved it, but then the computer was shut off by a power failure. Now he goes to Recent Documents and sees it, but when he clicks on it, he gets an error saying it can't be read.

I'm assuming the file is corrupted, so I'll need some kind of simple recovery software. Can anyone point me to a free version of a Word recovery program that would be simple to use? Thanks for your help!

the only one i could find is

http://www.freedownloadscenter.com/Utiliti...y_Software.html

ahhh lol just found this one

http://www.brothersoft.com/Business_Word_P...dFIX_12547.html

Try open it with Notepad?

Then you might be able to manually extract out the contents, however you will loose all text formatting.

Which version of Word is he using? ... and did he have AutoRecover / automatic backup enabled?

Recent Documents may not work because the shortcut is damaged or the .doc file is lost, but there may be a .wbk backup copy.

If it's Word 2003, anything remotely salvageable should be accessible through the Document Recovery panel.

You're not to far off however the Notepad replacement metapad can open with formatting MS Word saved .doc files. that have been saved as 'Word 97-2003 &6.0/95 - RTF (*.doc)'. It can open Word 2003 formatted files however the file formatting will be completely lost, and as Eldmannen already stated you may be able to extract from the file. It probably wouldn't hurt to give Wordpad/Write a try to see what they can get from the file.