My husband just got laid off and we’re trying to find him new work. This is complicated by the fact that his resume will not open.
The original file is a .wps. I think it was created at his school, so may have originally been in a different format, but we have Open Office at home, and I am pretty sure he could open it at one point. Now, when we try to open it, it wants to open in Notepad, which gives a big garbled mess of characters. I tried “open as” but nothing is listed except Notepad. I tried browsing, but there’s no listing for Open Office. It’s there when I go into programs. I opened Open Office directly and tried to open the file with it, and it gives me a choice of filters. I have no idea what that means. I tried the Writer filter and the choice box went away like I’d made a choice, but nothing else happened, and the file did not open.
How can I get that file back?
If you or a friend has Microsoft Word, there’s a file type called “Recover Text from any file (.)”. That ought to give you whatever intelligible stuff it can find, and ignore the “big garbled mess of characters”. Of course, it will need a lot of reformatting and other work, but it should get you started. Good luck!
You can download and install the Microsoft Word Viewer for free. You may be able to open the file using that program. But this may not work if the file was created with a newer version of Microsoft Works. In that case, download the Microsoft Works 6–9 File Converter.
Once you can view the document, you should be able to copy and paste the text to a free program like Google Docs.
Some useful info here. The file was created in Microsoft Works which is now discontinued.
.wps is the default file extension for Microsoft Works Word Processor, which is Microsoft’s free program, and in my experience is included in all versions of Windows, going back to XP, and possibly earlier.
It always baffles me when people have trouble with that format. Literally every computer I have used in the last 8 years has had that program installed.
The answer if to use LibreOffice rather than OpenOffice. The developers of OpenOffice split a while back because of the increasing commmerciality of OpenOffice. LibreOffice looks and works almost exactly the same as OpenOffice and is based on the same source code but has a few extras. One of the extras is that it can read .wps files.
I have LibreOffice at work- will try that.
Thanks, all!
I’ve never come across an XP install that came with MS-Works installed. Not saying that it didn’t happen, (esp. with big box store crapware loaded PCs) but not common in the PC worlds I’ve moved thru. 8.x was supposed to be compatible with XP and 9.0 was designed to be compatible with Vista. And that’s the end of that line. But I haven’t stumbled across any version dating post-Win9X era.
I have also run into problems opening Works document files many, many times. The various versions were just not backward compatible in this department.
For more info on trying to open Works files in other programs, see this Wikipedia section.