Unable to open recovered word file

after my mac crashed with my hard drive plugged in i found half the files missing, using recuva i was able to see them but unfortunately the files had been overwritten, never the less i tried to recover the file but was unable to open it due to corruption. But when i tried to repair it using words open and repair tool it said there was no content to the file but i can clearly see its size is 36 kb, so whats the 36 kb if the files empty, is there another way to access it