A Word document opens as random symbols and gibberish characters — or Word pops up "File Conversion: select the encoding that makes your document readable" and NO encoding in the list makes it readable

What's actually wrong

Gibberish has three very different causes, and the first two are harmless. If you opened the file in Notepad/TextEdit and it starts with "PK", you're looking at the raw bytes of a perfectly healthy docx (which is really a ZIP archive) — just open it in Word instead, and never save it from the text editor. If Word opens it but every letter is a symbol, it's usually a missing font. The bad case is when Word itself no longer recognizes the docx structure and falls back to its plain-text importer — that encoding dialog where nothing is readable means real structural corruption, though the text often still exists inside the damaged archive.

Free fixes — try these first

1. Check the first two characters. Open the file in Notepad (Windows) or with a text editor (Mac): if it begins with PK, the file is fine — close WITHOUT saving and open it in Word/LibreOffice instead. Saving from the text editor is what destroys it.
2. Rule out a font problem. If the document opens in Word but shows symbols, press Ctrl+A and switch the font to Arial or Times New Roman. If text appears, the file was never corrupted — a font was missing.
3. Open and Repair. File → Open → Browse → select the file → arrow next to Open → Open and Repair.
4. Extract the text from the ZIP yourself. Make a copy, rename it from .docx to .zip, and double-click. If it opens, pull out word/document.xml and open it in a browser or text editor — your text is in there between the tags, ready to copy out.
5. Try LibreOffice. Its parser tolerates malformed docx files that make Word fall back to the gibberish/encoding dialog.

If the free fixes fail

When the ZIP container itself is mangled — the rename-to-zip trick fails and every encoding shows garbage — our analyzer reconstructs the archive structure and tells you honestly what percentage of the original text survived before you go further.