I need Microsoft Word - Will this work?

[Scuba Steve]

Open Office, FTW!!

[red-beard]

Originally Posted by stomachmonkey

For what it's worth software versions are like viruses. As more people use the newer versions the older ones become less compatible forcing you to upgrade.

Latest version of Word/Excel save as .docx and .xlsx which previous versions can't open.

If you decide to buy Word get the newest version that you can find.

I use Office 2003 and there is a compatibility pack you can download to use the Office 2007 (.docx, .xlsx, etcx) files.

[Tishabet]

Originally Posted by G50

I got open office installed, and the Word program works.

I left the Word Perfect program installed on the computer.

The problem is, when someone emails a Word doc, and I click to open it, the computer for some reason automatically tries to open it with Word Perfect, which it can't do.

Is there a way I can "disable" WP, or otherwise make the computer use the Open Office/Word program to open Word docs?

I can't believe nobody has mentioned Open Office yet

As far as the computer trying to open up the word doc in word perfect, try this (you should only need to do this once, not every time you open an attachment)

-Save the attachment to your machine somewhere, and locate the file on your machine
-Right click on the file
-Scroll down to "open with"
-Depending on your version of word, you will now see either a "choose default program" option in the menu OR a list of programs and beneath that a check box saying "always use this program for this file type" or something like that. You need to select open office to open this type of program.

Or, you can just remove word perfect from your machine.

Hope this helps!

[stomachmonkey]

Originally Posted by G50

I got open office installed, and the Word program works.

I left the Word Perfect program installed on the computer.

The problem is, when someone emails a Word doc, and I click to open it, the computer for some reason automatically tries to open it with Word Perfect, which it can't do.

Is there a way I can "disable" WP, or otherwise make the computer use the Open Office/Word program to open Word docs?

Right click a document that you want to open in Open Office/Word. You should have an option to "Open with". You'll get a list of software that can open it, chose Open Office. There is also an option to "do this with all files like this"

On another note it would be great if there were a compatibility pack or some other way to open newer Word docs in older versions.

[G50]

Just in case anyone does a search and finds this thread in the future, I just want to say I found and downloaded a free program called Open Office that seems to work great! I can now open all the Word docs that are emailed to me.

(I also got it to be the default program to open documents the way Tishabet/stomachmonkey) described.

Thanks all!