Microsoft Word is much more stable than it used to be. Starting with Word 2007, Microsoft introduced the DOCX file format, which is essentially a ZIP archive of files, most of which are based on XML. It's much less likely to get corrupted than the older, binary DOC format. But nothing is perfect, and occasionally a Word file will go south.
This happened to someone on the Editors Association of Earth Facebook group. When they tried to open the file, they got an XML parsing error. The backup file was also corrupted, and Google Docs wouldn't open the file.
However, they were able to open the file in Libre Office. Everything appeared to be OK except that their change tracking was lost, but they were able to recover that using the document compare feature with an earlier version of the file.
Based on my own experience with Word, I suspect that the corruption originated with Word's the track changes feature6. I've found that it sometimes fails to work, especially in large documents with complex formatting or many tables. Using the document compare feature is more reliable and safer.
So if you use Word, it's probably worth keeping a copy of Libre Office on your computer just in case.
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