Word documents use a proprietary format. That means that without your spending an extensive amount of time to reverse engineer their file format, any edits that you do have at least the potential to corrupt the document.

Enter the proprietary format that Microsoft based on HTML which they designed for transferring files between their programs. This format has the advantage that it is entirely plain text making the proprietary tags much easier to identify when you want to edit the file outside Word and it can be imported back into Word restoring the original file perfectly except for your changes.

Editing Word Files Outside of Word

Tags: edit, html, microsoft, word