Word – How to recover an RTF file that comes up blank in Word

It's not obvious how to do this (I've tried for some time myself) but I stumbled on the answer today. Works for text outlines that are indented by tabs or by spaces. You can cut and paste the text or open the text file using the File-Open menu.

1. Select all the text using ctrl+a or by the Select All menu item. This highlights all the text.

2. Click on the Multilevel List icon (in the Paragraph section of the Home tab, it's the third icon next to the Bullets and Numbering icons. From the pop-up box, click on one of the icons that show Heading 1, Heading 2, etc. - these are lower in the box. This applies headings to the text.

3. Click on the View tab and then the Outline icon in the Documents Views section. You'll now see the text outline with the ability to expand/collapse each level.

You would first need to verify if the document in question is open protected (the password is only needed to open the document) or if the document is encrypted (which means the password is used to decrypt the document).

If it is the first then you may still be able to get the content extracted by recovering the text in Microsoft Word. If it is the latter then I'm afraid there is probably no way to recover the data. If the data is corrupted then decryption process won't work and there is no easy way to get the data back.