Cannot open a rescued Word document.doc

I know this thread is old but I have been trying the get past the "Microsoft Word cannot open this file because it is an unsupported file type" error when opening standalone .asd files all day today as my home backup task makes copies of the asd files that Word creates every 5 minutes and pastes the copy .asd into a separate folder to assist recovery from accidental deletions.  Call me paranoid :-)

The discovery I thought worth sharing is that I was able to successfully open .asd files with all the original formatting and text and the file looked exactly like the last time it was saved.  Previous to this discovery I kept getting the "......unsupported file type" error and the best i could do was recover the text using the text recovery or notepad options.  The same .asd files that couldn't open before now open correctly in "Read Only" mode but have all the text and formatting saving you minutes or hours of formatting work!

So here it is: (it's so simply but it works)

The first step is the most important - this is what made it work!

(1) Place a copy the .asd file into the unsaved files folder.  The location of this folder on my system is "C:\Users%username%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Office\UnsavedFiles"

(2) Open Word and click on File - Recent

(3) Looking down the bottom of the screen you see a button/box titled "Recover Unsaved Documents"

(4) Click that button/box and open the .asd file you placed in the unsaved files folder in Step (1).

If it works then a smile returns to your face and all is forgiven.  Blood pressure subsides and everyone is happy again.  If it doesn't work then the .asd is possibly corrupt and try recovering just the text out of the file using all the suggestions on this thread and the internet.  Good luck!

Last comment: Without doing the first step of placing the .asd file into the special folder I couldn't get past the error.  I'm not an advanced Word problem solver just a person trying to make my back routine work.  My environment is Windows 7 64-bit /  Word 2010 32-bit.

Nathan,

Your step by step instructions worked for me.  I've been working on my Word file for over an hour and my Word application crashed.  I was able to find the ASD file almost immediately and I know it had the content I was working on because I was able to view the data in a NotePad but I also wanted to recover the formatting.  When I tried opening the ASD file from Word, I got the same message saying the it was unsupported file type.  However, after moving the file to the location you specified and opening the file via the Recent menu option, Recovery Unsaved documents, it WORKED!

Thanks!  You saved me an hour worth of re-editing.

Thank you for giving me this idea. I opened up the Auto Recovery in wordpad, had to scroll a bit through the garbled stuff but found my last saved work right in there. I could not open the auto recovery file in word, but this worked! 

Huzzah.

Thank you so much this worked. Your the best