In Windows 95, when I open .doc files, they open with wordpad as they are supposed to, I guess. But there are all kinds of other characters, squares and such. This happens especially when I try to open my Outlook Express folders in Windows/application data/etc.
How can I open these files so that I can read them?
I’m afraid the answer to your question is that you should use the program they were intended to be opened with.
The .doc extension is the native extension for Microsoft Word documents. WordPad uses a MSWord 6.0-compatible document format, IIRC, but you are probably opening Word97 or newer documents and it can’t handle them. Ask whoever created them to save them as Word 6.0/95 and you should be fine.
Hope this helps.
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What the hell kind of idiot would design a word processing program that outputs its text in a format that can’t be read unless the recipient also owns a copy of that program? Why, that’s like building a typewriter that creates documents in a code that can only be decoded by someone who owns the same kind of typewriter. That kind of strategy would only make sense if one had a monopoly on the word processing market, but surely such a monopoly would never be permitted!
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Word can be read in many Word Processing programs (including non-Microsoft ones), just not Wordpad.
Most other word processing programs save their file in their own particular format. I don’t see you ranting about WordPerfect doing the same thing.
All legacy software has trouble reading files in newer versions of software. As a matter of fact, Microsoft seems to be the leader in reducing this problem; Word 2000 files are backward compatible.
Take it to the pit, ** City Gent **. Some members of the SDMB work there and don’t appreciate getting ripped in GQ.
BTW, I seem to recall having trouble getting my WordPerfect files to work with free text editors, when DOS Word did just that, long before Windows existed at all, and long before Word was the #1 Word Processor.
I’m not “ripping” anybody but the chief software engineer for Word, and I don’t think he frequents the SDMB (but you never know).
Formats have been devised explicitly to solve the problem of sending a document to someone who doesn’t have your software. Among them are Postscript and PDF. I’m open to a technical explanation for why Word won’t write in these formats at the push of a button. In another forum, of course 
City Gent has chosen to boast his ignorance. You should know that each and every word processing program uses its own format and, from that point of view they are all incompatible. Then, the may add the capability of interpreting other formats and converting them to their own. To demand that a program written earlier be able to interpret a format developed later is impossible. Is it clear now that Citi Gent doesn’t have a clue? Or do I need to elaborate further?
If you need to save a word document into a different format check out the ‘save as’ file types (drop down list box near bottom of dialog box), specifically the ‘save as type’ option.
You can save your document in a wide variety of formats including the one that you may want. If not, it is likely that it costs money (royalties to other company) to produce a document in that format. You can probably export it into a format that can be imported into the program you need it in if necessary. Rich text Format (RTF) often accomplishes the task.
If you get those boxes and other characters it means the software you used sort of understands the file, but not completely. Another program would turn those characters into something you can understand.
You are mistaken. First of all, I never used the word “incompatibility”, because obviously you can’t expect, for instance, Word Perfect to take a document from Word as native. That could only work if there were a Word clone embedded in Word Perfect.
The subject of the OP, which I was clearly referring to, was the ability to read documents generated by a word processor in their fully formatted form. This is the purpose of a standard such as PDF. I can convert almost any document to PDF; the difference is that with a good program like LaTeX you can do it automatically as part of the standard distribution (which is free, I might add), while with bad programs like Word (which costs hundreds of dollars) you can’t. To make a Word document universally readable, you’d have to either write it as HTML (with the associated loss of formatting) or buy Adobe Distiller and convert the native format to PDF or Postscript.
During the Industrial Revolution, manufacturers of nuts and bolts quickly realized that in a competitive market, standards benefit everyone. You can make nuts without worrying whether the threads will fit a bolt made by someone else; such a standardized nut is functionally superior to a nut that only fits the bolts you manufacture. That lesson has evidently been lost on many commercial software makers. They insist on making nuts that don’t fit anyone else’s bolts. This is only smart if you have a monopoly on the market for nuts and bolts and therefore don’t care whether your nut doesn’t fit some bolt that has hardly any market share.
And as a matter of integrity, I’d advise that you get a little more familiar with the facts and take some time to understand what the thread is about before you start accusing people of ignorance.
If we’re just talking about reading DOC files, Word has a free Word Viewer, available for download at the MS website. Dowload it, just like Acrobat Reader, and you don’t need to buy Word to view DOC files.
That’s a step in the right direction which I was not aware of until now, but…
According to the download page, it can only read Word 97 documents (not Word 2000).
It’s odd that Microsoft went to the trouble of creating a Word viewer when they could just as easily have put a PDF output function in Word itself. Then you could use Acrobat Reader, which most people already have, to read Word documents without installing an additional program.
It took half an hour to download over a T1 connection. That’s an all-night job for a dialup connection.
My gripe is that there’s already a completely satisfactory standard (PDF), but Microsoft seems bent on ignoring that standard at the expense of the functionality of its own products, apparently because supporting it might make users aware that there are other software companies besides Microsoft.
That said, Word Viewer works a hell of a lot better than Wordpad. Too bad they don’t ship it with Windows.