Manufactured by Recoveronix Ltd., Recovery for Wordis made to help users repair damaged DOC and DOCX files produced by all versions of Microsoft Word up to the latest 2010. Unlike some of the competing products, Recovery for Word does not provide the ability to undelete Word documents, so you’ll be dealing with DOC/DOCX files that are still in a readable form.
Performance
Recovery for Word is a plain and straightforward tool. Its user interface, if we can call it that, is a single window with a folder tree on the left, a file list on the right, status window and a couple of buttons. No step-by-step wizards, no modes to select and no configuration settings to adjust.
Recovery for Word demonstrated solid performance in the lab. It fixed all the DOC and DOCX files we deliberately corrupted. In most cases, everything was recovered, including backgrounds, pictures, and mostembedded objects such as charts and formulas, and of course the original fonts and formatting.
Naturally, it does not come without limitations. The Web site lists that it can’t recover VB modules (we didn’t have any), and can only partially fix documents created with Mac versions of Microsoft Word. Having no Mac PC on hands, we could not verify it. Also, the manufacturer states that not all OLE objects can be recovered; there’s a list of what Recovery for Word supports, and that includes most MS Office applications except Office Drawing 2007-2010.
Unlike competition, Recovery for Word does not come with any sort of preview for the documents you are about to recover. To evaluate the tool, you would be looking at a partially recovered document, trying to guess whether any missing parts are due to the trial status of the tool or if they are genuinely lost. Us, we’ll take the preview vs. partially recovered document any day of the week.
There’s naturally a strong point to Recovery for Word. Namely, the tool can recover password-protected documents produced by Word 97-2003 and provided that the password is known. While limited, the featured offered here is unique to Recovery for Word and not offered by any of the competitors we tested so far.
Value
Licenses for Recovery for Word start at $69. Recovery for Word has many inherent limitations; too many if you ask us. Its inability to deal with deleted documents or restore files from a crashed hard disk are just too limiting to many users. The range of OLE objects that can be recovered by Recovery for Word is also very, very limited and restricted by certain applications that are parts of Microsoft Office Suite.
However, there is one strong point in Recovery for Word: it can repair password-protected documents produced by Word 97-2003 and provided that you know the password. No competitor tested thus far can do that.
In order to compensate for the lack of features when dealing with deleted files, Recoveronix offers a free tool named FreeUndelete. While being the worst undelete tool ever (among those we tested in the lab at least), it shows they at least tried to address the issue. Still a long way to go to match the quality of any competitor.
Competition wise, there’s Diskinternals Word Recovery ($79.95). For some $11 more than the price of Recovery for Word, DiskinternalsWord Recovery packs lots more into the package. A nice user interface with guided step-by-step wizards, fully visual pre-recovery preview, the ability to recover all types of embedded objects and not just those included with the Office Suite. And of course, the ability to recover deleted files and extract documents stored on crashed disks and memory cards.
For a few more dollars, DiskInternals offers a comprehensive Office Recovery suite that, in addition to Word documents, can also recover Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations and a variety of other documents in Microsoft Office and OpenOffice formats.
There’s just one area where Recovery for Word has an edge over Diskinternals Word Recovery. That is the ability to repair password-protected documents. While severely limited to known-password, Word 97-2003 documents only, this is still something that makes Recovery for Wordstand out. If you don’t need this feature, the choice of Diskinternals Word Recovery over Recovery for Word should be very clear. If you have a password-protected document that fits the list of limitations imposed by Recovery for Word, then you might have a second thought here.
Features
- Repairs RTF, DOC and DOCX files produced by Windows and Mac versions of Microsoft Word
- Repairs corrupted Microsoft Word6.0/95/97/2000/XP/2002/2003/2007/2010 documents
- Supports Windows 98, ME, NT, 2000, XP, 2003, Vista, Windows 7
- Automatically finds all MS Word documents
- Safe to use: won’t modify the original documents
- High speed
- Trial version provides partial recovery
Drawbacks
- No pre-recovery preview
- No support for deleted files, corrupted disks, or formatted partitions
- No support for legacy versions of Windows (95, 98, ME)
- Documents produced by Mac versions of MS Word can be only partially recovered
- Only recovers some (not all) OLE objects
- Does not recover OLE objects in Office 2007-2010
- Does not recover Office Drawing 2007-2010
- Does not recover VB modules and drawings
- High price for the limited feature set