Overview
When opening a Word document in the desktop app, this error is shown: Word found unreadable content in […]. Do you want to recover the contents of this document?
Solutions
There are multiple issues that can cause this error.
Cause #1: Page breaks, section breaks, and paragraph breaks
In a report, there must be a paragraph break (¶) to the left of (or directly above) each page break and section break or this error will occur.
Open the document and enable the paragraph markers (click the ¶ button on the Home tab of Word).
Look for all page breaks and section breaks in the document and make sure that there’s a ¶ symbol to the left of (or directly above) each one.
Hit Enter before the page/section break anywhere where there is not a ¶ symbol to the left or directly above the break.
You can also use a “find and replace” to do this all at once.
You may want to apply this fix to the template that was used to generate the report to prevent this issue from occurring on any future documents generated from this template.
Cause #2: Manual line breaks
If your document contains a table, and you need to insert a line break within a cell, hitting Enter normally will not insert a line break. If you used Alt+Enter (Control+Option+Enter on Mac) to insert a line break, this can cause the error. Remove the previous line break and instead use Shift+Enter to insert the line break.
Cause #3: Microsoft Office Online
There are numerous other issues that can occur with Microsoft Office that will cause this error to occur that may not be listed here. This may happen after a user has edited a document in Microsoft Office Online and then opened it in Office for desktop afterwards. You may be able to narrow down the cause of the issue through testing and removing parts of the document, and then re-writing the parts that generated the error.
Other solutions
If none of the solutions above worked, you can still open the document in the Word desktop app by clicking “Yes” on the error message. To make edits to the document, you'll need to save a local copy of the document to your computer, and then upload it as a new version in Fieldguide.