If you have a .docx file (most likely created by Microsoft Word 2007) you can actually see what's inside it! This is because Word 2007 creates a number of files and compresses them into one single .docx file.

To do this, rename the filename.docx to filename.zip and extract the zip-file with your favorite zip extractor (I will always recommend Universal Extractor! It's free and extracts anything). After extraction, you will see many different files and folders containing information about styles, the document text and so on. You can even see all the original images in the document as normal image files!

Unless severely damaged you should be able to either correct the corrupted file (Word 2007 sometimes tells you in which file the error has occurred) or at least read what you have typed, your images and so on.

This has saved me a few times!

This tip also works with other Office 2007 xml files - such as pptx (Powerpoint) and xlsx (Excel)