Recovering a Word file

This just happened to a coworker of mine where he openned up a Word file and got the message "The document name or path is not valid." The way I fixed the problem was to open up the Word file in WordPad and save it as an RTF file. You would lose some formatting, but all your content (including pictures) should still be retained. You can then load up the file back into Word and copy and paste the text over to the proper places. Please note if you are sending the fixed file back, save it as Word again since RTF is not space efficient especially if you have pictures embedded in the document.