ECN Forum Forums Technical Discussion Re: Computers and the Internet Opening Word Documents

I don't have MS Word or Office on my Computer, as I don't really have a need for it.
Having said that, every now and then, someone sends me a Word document that I can't open.
Can someone recommend a program that can be used to veiw Word Documents only without the horrendous cost of getting the whole Office or Word programs?.
Having to pay that amount for an Application that I would only use once or twice a year seems rather harsh.
Anyone have any suggestions?.

Cheers,
Mike.

try using www.openoffice.org

It's free

Hi Trumpy!

Don't know what version of windows you have, but, if you have "wordpad" or "notepad" you might try opening Word Docs. with those.

I have Windows XP with Word and Wordpad. Experimented w/ it a little and wordpad did open my Word Documents. Of course, I have full Office XP on my computer so the two may be related. I'm not that literate with computers.

Just a thought.

Windows Wordpad will open some MS Word documents.

I've also seen shareware and freeware viewers that will let you view an MS Word document (but not create or edit) as I needed to obtain one for somebody once.

I can't remember where I found them, but you might try the Garbo shareware library for a start. There's a ton of useful stuff there:
http://www.uwasa.fi/~ts/garbo.html

I am running win98 with MS Works at home and have had the same problem as you have had trying to open these files.

I talked to our help desk at work and found from them that Micosoft has viewers and converters. They can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/Office/000/viewers.asp

I have used the word, powerpoint and excell viewers with good results so far.

Indcom,
I use Windows XP.
I was trying to open a file that had a Radio Ham's Log Book sheet in it.
Notepad would be useless in this respect as it uses a grid to enter information.

There is the free-to-download Word viewer available for download from MS.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...8D5-8689-AB826E7B8FDF&displaylang=en

On unix there is openoffice but also there are useful Perl modules that allow one to drive the file conversion part of OOo under script control, so one can do a bulk conversion of .doc files into .pdf format.

Trumpy

Have you tried converting it into Exel and then try to access it. Never tried it myself...have converted exel to word but never vice-versa.