Adobe Acrobat Reader DC could not open because it is either not a supported file type or because the file has been damaged

[mikeh89040702]

Error message: Adobe Acrobat Reader DC could not open because it is either not a supported file type or because the file has been damaged (for example it was sent as an email attachment and was not decoded)

[Nancy OShea]

That error message says it all.  It's not a supported file type or if it is, it's corrupted. 

Which program was used to create the file? 

[williamm75606416]

MS Word (this problem just started happening today)

[Nancy OShea]

williamm,

What file type was the original Word file?

[williamm75606416]

It is an original (typed be me) Word file .docx, I have also tried it saving the file as .doc

[williamm75606416]

The mistake is on me, sorry.  Earlier I installed new software that also installed adobe 8.  After removing, re-installing, shutting down, etc., it is now working.

Thank you for your assistance.

[ZiaW]

Here is my issue and can't seem to find an answer, so I have a word doc in 365 and if I save it to my onedrive or any folder, it will save as a PDF, even though it shows the .docx ext when saving, I go to the folder and it has a pdf file type, only you can't open it in pdf, I get that error. Now, since I know it is a .docx file, if I right click and view online, then it will open in word, so weird, this is all my word files, I have one that is mixed btw word and PDF's so the issue there is which one is which when they all say PDF?  this is my dillemah! Any help would be greatly appreciated.  This has only been since the company switched over to 365.

[mike37808173v907]

But it is, and it's not!  only 1 user out of 1,000 has this issue.  This was a super lazy answer.

[~graffiti]

How did you receive the file? Is it a pdf?

[mikeh89040702]

Via email

[Nancy OShea]

Contact the sender of that email and ask them why you cannot open it.

Nancy O.

[mikeh89040702]

it was a attachment in PDF format

[~graffiti]

mikeh89040702 wrote:

it was a attachment in PDF format

Emailing a pdf file is the most common way to corrupt it. Some email clients will encode the pdf to make it smaller and therefore make the transfer faster but when it is unencoded at the other end, it corrupts. Have them either Zip it first or post it online and send you a link.

[mikeh89040702]

Thank you!

[~graffiti · Accepted solution]

You can "try" to save the pdf attachment first before opening it in Reader but most of the time, that doesn't make a difference. It will confirm that the file is being corrupted by the email though and not by some process involved in opening it from your email client.

[mikeh89040702]

Thank you!!

[Brandon26703897cdmb]

I received a pdf file from client and couldn't open it in Adobe Acrobat DC (Pro).I changed Compatibility and ran troubleshooting from the "right click-->Properties-->Compatibility tab and it didn't work. I managed to open it from either Edge and Chrome browser and save it as PDF instead, and now coudl open it. Dislikes the work around but at least I could open it now.

[Nancy OShea]

Ask the client which software & version they used to create the original PDF.  It's possible they used another PDF creation tool that's incompatible with Acrobat. 

[davidn45538993]

Way easier - go to cloudconvert.com -- works like magic

[carlyle302]

I tried lots of other things, but this worked for me.  I was able to open and repair the damaged PDF file by converting it to a "PDF".  Thanks for sharing.

[Rebeckah5C5A]

How did you convert it if it didnt open?

[alliah22114669tw6v]

For me, I right click on the link to the PDF document I am trying to open, I selected the option to SAVE LINK AS>Save in my documents on my computer>Go to cloudconvert.com>Select File>And that worked for me.

[alliah22114669tw6v]

Genius, thanks for sharing.

[Shawn24647537qxgd · Accepted solution]

If you use Microsoft OneDrive and you're seeing this, open OneDrive and see if the issue goes away.

I was seeing this issue on a LOT of my PDF files and I was freaking out because these are my important files.  When I opened a command prompt to look at the files with the DIR command I noticed that the "damaged" files had their file sizes in parentheses.  I googled that and found that onedrive files that are not locally stored on the computer show their sizes in parentheses like this.  So I opened OneDrive and everything started working properly again.  Onedrive usually runs all the time in the background so this process was stopped at some point and that's when the problem started.  When I opened OneDrive manually then it started the process and all is well.  I hope this helps some people!

[Guest]

It was a OneDrive issue for me indeed, thansk a lot !