S9 issue on viewing word documents

[Android Central Question]

Hi. First of all sorry for my incompetence. I am very non-tech.

I downloaded some word documents a friend sent me via whatsapp, I worked on them and saved them back in another folder in my phone. Last time I worked on them was 3 days ago and could open and view them perfectly.

Today I checked and can not open them. The error that pops is: "Cant open file. Try saving the file in the device and then open it". After that I tried the following and nothing worked:
1. Restart my phone
2. Save the file in other folder. I could not and also could not move it to other folder.
3. Updated Microsoft word
4. Disabled Microsoft word and enabling it again
5. Downloading a file manager (TM File manager)
6. Downloaded rar (by cheetah)

In the last 2 cases the files I can not open dont even appear while in my phone memory I can see the files with the .docx extension and when I press them open the aformentioned error pops up.

Not sure if it is related. Yesterday I cleared my memory out of all the pics and vids, and back them up in my external hard disc. I had (approximately 20-25gb) because my 64gb memory was almost full. Still my memory didnt drop to 40gb as expected but it is still at 58gb, this is also weird. Maybe these two combine? Because the last time my files were working was before the transfer of the file and the first time I checked after the transfer the files were not working.

Thanks

 

[Rukbat]

1. Uninstall any and all apps by Cheetah Mobile. They're known to steal anything they can from your phone and send to their server in China.

2. If you have pictures backed up, all you deleted wee thumbnails, which don't take much space. The pictures themselves are stored in the cloud.

3. As to what happened to the documents, no idea. You can try copying them to a PC and seeing if word, the actual program, can open them. Opening them as text files wouldn't show you much - they're basically .xls files. (But if you know someone who's tech-literate, that's one way of seeing what's going on and fixing any problems.)