windows 7 and cant read word documents

traceya89

i have just got a newish computer but it has windows 7 on and i have been unable to open most word documents as they come up with all little signs. the guy i got it off said i needed a disc to convert documents and said he would get me one, but im still waiting. i have looked at ebay but i really dont know what i need. i have office 2000 and office 2010 on the computer as i installed an old version of office to see if this would solve the problem

can anyone advise what to do.

Browntoa

This is free

http://www.openoffice.org/download/

Browntoa

Or it's possibly this if you have office already

http://blogs.technet.com/b/office_sustained_engineering/archive/2013/09/18/office-2010-starter-edition-file-type-associations-missing-after-september-2013-update.aspx

macman

If you can open .doc but not .docx, files then all you need is the MS Office compatability pack.
But if you have correctly installed Office 2010, then it should already open both types.

ThemeOne

I would try removing Office 2000 (which is not officially compatible with Windows 7) and re-installing Office 2010.

Provided Office is properly installed and licenced there should be no question of needing a disk to convert documents.

henm2

Another alternative is to install Libre Office as that will open all Microsoft word document formats.

aerostar

You have a program on WIN7 called Wordpad - try that to open your docs.

tyllwyd

When you say 'they come up with all little signs' what do you mean? Can you open Word 2010 in the normal way? Can you open documents - is it the text in the documents that isn't displaying properly?

traceya89

the little signs seem to be encrypted codes and figures
when i try to open a document that ihave downloaded it comes up

select the encoding that makes your document

text encoding

windows ms doc other encoding
and u need to pick one of these!

alanrowell

What happens if you open Word, then open a document from it?

prowla

Word documents are saved in a format which Notepad doesn't understand, so it just displays things like the formatting and so-on as its best attempt at text.

Newer versions of office tend to use newer ("improved") document formats, and older version may not be able to understand them, though some have "compatibility packs" available.

Office 2010 is a very good product, probably the best that Microsoft have produced (excluding Excel, anyway), so acquiring and installing that could be an option.

There is also the free Open Office (and a variant called Libre Office, produced after Open Office was acquired by a commercial company), which can generally read MS Office documents. Open/Libre Office does a pretty good job, but it is not a clone of MS Office and so does some things in different ways (which isn't necessarily a bad thing, just different).