This is an interesting question, and my first time answering on this forum :) If the file had been encrypted, generic recovery tools would not be able to show any partially recovered data, so that's good news if generic recovery tools are showing some results. (They'll always have you pay the licensing fee for recovery though, otherwise people would just download the trial program once when something bad happens and never actually make the purchase). There's a number of things that could cause file corruption. If it's a .docx, a quick test to see the extent of the damage, try to open the file in winzip or 7zip or any unzip utility. .docx is a zipped xml based file container, and word puts all that glue together to format a document. Within that zip you'll typically see a list of files like document.xml, settings.xml, styles.xml, etc. If a file in the file container is damaged, word will just fall over dead. If you can open it in a zip archive utility like winzip or 7zip, we can talk further about a manual...