word to wordpad

PJLLB said:

I just spot-checked opening up a bunch of .docx files with Wordpad, and each opened correctly -- no garbage. Not sure what's going on with yours.

My problem is that they're not .docx, they're .doc.

OldGuyGeek said:

The most popular and safe free alternative to Word is OpenOffice. Just make sure you download it from their official site. It is fully compatible with Word and Excel.

Apache OpenOffice - Official Site - The Free and Open Productivity Suite

By the way the characters you see are the imbedded formatting codes that are particular to Word. WordPad just shows the raw characters instead of formatting the document.

Thanks. For a while at least I'll see how it goes erasing the hieroglyphics and staying with Pad.

If I do go for one of the free processors, I'll definitely be careful. I ended up with a mess last time, before I knew anything about stowaways.

Wordpad should be able to open .doc as well as .docx. It's the older versions of Wordpad that have a problem with .docx. The change to .docx and other applications in the Office suite came with Office/Word/Excel 2007. A problem exists when folks have Works files, was discontinued with version 9.x. I find LibreOffice better for my older clients that have Works files, supports them where OpenOffice dropped that support in the latter version 3.x, doesn't support Works in Version 4.x, may have been around the time Apache got it.

I know you said you didn't want Word, but abandoning any program that uses a proprietary format for years is just inviting the troubles that you have now. The same goes for Photoshop. I changed over to PaintShopPro from Corel two years ago. PSP doesn't read all .psd files perfectly, but once I converted I was happier with the lower price software which has many of the same features. Of course now I have to save everything in PaintShopPro format. But it goes on sale for $39 vs the hundreds of $$$ for Photoshop.

A cheap easy way to fix your problem is to sign up for MS Office 365 Home. For $99 per year, you even get the desktop versions. At least you could try buying Office on a monthly plan, ($9.99 per month) and try it out for a month.

Lastly, Office has a version for $69 a year for 5 users and up to 5 devices per user. So if anyone else in your family needs word processing or spreadsheets, they get it free with your purchase (also they get Outlook, PowerPoint and Access if they need any of those) . I got mine on sale for $79 earlier this year and we have 3 people and about 10 devices running under the same license. Lastly each user get 1TB of online storage. Each user.

OldGuyGeek said:

I know you said you didn't want Word, but abandoning any program that uses a proprietary format for years is just inviting the troubles that you have now. The same goes for Photoshop. I changed over to PaintShopPro from Corel two years ago. PSP doesn't read all .psd files perfectly, but once I converted I was happier with the lower price software which has many of the same features. Of course now I have to save everything in PaintShopPro format. But it goes on sale for $39 vs the hundreds of $$$ for Photoshop.

A cheap easy way to fix your problem is to sign up for MS Office 365 Home. For $99 per year, you even get the desktop versions. At least you could try buying Office on a monthly plan, ($9.99 per month) and try it out for a month.

Lastly, Office has a version for $69 a year for 5 users and up to 5 devices per user. So if anyone else in your family needs word processing or spreadsheets, they get it free with your purchase (also they get Outlook, PowerPoint and Access if they need any of those) . I got mine on sale for $79 earlier this year and we have 3 people and about 10 devices running under the same license. Lastly each user get 1TB of online storage. Each user.

I got fed up with Microsoft Word. I swore I'd never use it again. That was years ago. I've been using Word Perfect for a few years. It's a lot cheaper, just as fancy, and I haven't had any problems with people telling they can't open my files.

I just lost a computer and haven't had a chance to load Word Perfect yet, (if there are any installations left on it) but the simplest way is stay with Wordpad. I went through about five documents so far here. It's easy enough to erase the code stuff before and after the text. Now that I have the defaults set, the documents come right up in Wordpad (with a little cleaning up to do). It's cool.

Thanks to everybody for the guidance.

OpenOffice and Libre office come from the same project. Libre Office split as they recognized that they had to be compatible with Office.

As of September 2016 there have been numerous reports Apache retiring Open Office project.