Document is Too Large for Word to Handle

Danesh has a document that he is trying to open in Word 2010. When he tries, Word responds, "The document is too large for Word to handle." Danesh has had it open in Word before, and the system he's using has more than enough resources available. He wonders about the best way to get into his document.

Anytime you start seeing messages like this—particularly if your machine isn't really limited on RAM or disk space—it means there is a good chance that your document file is somehow corrupted. The first order of business is to make a copy of the file (so in case you really mess one up, you have another) and then try this:

1. Open Word with a blank, new document.
2. Display the Open dialog box. (In Word 2007 and Word 2010 press Ctrl+O. In Word 2013 and Word 2016 press Ctrl+O, click Computer, then click Browse. In Word 2019 or Word in Office 365 press Ctrl+O.)
3. Locate and click once on the problem document.
4. Click the down-arrow next to the Open button. Word displays different ways you can open the document.
5. Click Open and Repair.

Word does its thing and tries to open the document and fix any internal pointers that may have gone haywire.

If that doesn't work, you should try to open the document in a different program to see if it can be recovered. Good options to try are WordPad, Open Office, LibreOffice, and Notepad. If you are able to open it in any of these other programs, do a "Save As" and save the document into a new file. You should then be able to open that file in Word.

You could also try using a program that will convert a Word document into a PDF file. (Word 2019 and Word in Office 365 allow you to print the Word document to a PDF which essentially converts the document into a PDF file.) If you can successfully do the conversion, you could then use that program (or another one) to convert the PDF file back to a Word document. The "round trip" on the document could clean up a lot of problems and allow you to work with the document.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (6043) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, and 2013.