Office Docs after recovery are garbled

Hello all,

Yesterday I did something stupid and deleted a big directory directly because it was too big for Reclycle Bin. Later that day my wife was 'in all states'. They were her one and only files.

So I took Recuva and restored them last night. All seemed well until i started openening one of the excel.

It states: The file you are trying to open doesn't have the filestructure as indicated by the file extension.... (freely translated from Dutch) and then it shows a whole array of symbols. Turns out that most Office Docs are garbled. So the restore now is useless.

I know I immediately secured the harddisk and restored to a different one.

Can anyone help me?

Yes, I will make sure my wife makes backups in the future.