My 13-year-old honorary grandson has sent me a text file in .WPS format.
You would think this would be a simple question, but I don’t seem to be able to come up with an accurate answer. What program is that the default word processing file output format in? And what can I open it with that I have?
I have Open Office 3.0, MS Word 2002, Edit Pad Pro, and the normal Windows text processors (Wordpad, Notepad, etc.). I do know how to import documents from other formats into them, but I haven’t a clue what he wrote it in.
This sounds so simple to resolve, but I’m getting gibberish from various guesses in Word importing converter, and my Google-fu has failed me utterly.
I can’t really help, but for what it’s worth: I sent a document last year to people and they emailed me back saying they couldn’t open it, and it was a wps file. I noticed I had used Word Perfect (Corel) to prepare the document. I had to retype said text in Windows Word in order to rectify the situation.
I have Word Perfect on the office computer because a lot of our old files are in Corel WP.
I don’t think that’s right. I think MoodIndigo got it – it’s Word Perfect. I think the solution is to have the sender go into Word Perfect, and save the file in a format compatible with Microsoft Word. If I remember my Word Perfect correctly, that was an option.
The easiest thing to do is to have your grandson re-send it. But tell him that this time, click on “save as” and choose the .doc format (which you should be able to open with word.
I’ve used zamzar.com for converting Works document to something I can read (I think I used PDF, but it’s been a while). It works pretty well. I’ve only used the free version; I have no idea if the pay version is worth paying for.
Retyping is ridiculous. Unless you are using a very old version of WordPerfect, from the days when it was the dominant word processor, you can easily save your file from WP into various MS Word compatible formats, including RTF which virtually any word processor should be able to handle.
Come to that, most versions of MS Word can read most types of WordPerfect files quite easily (maybe not simply by double-clicking the file, but by, for instance, dragging the file into a Word window), so the people you sent it to were probably idiots to say they couldn’t read it.
Even failing those simple options, you could have copied and pasted the text from WordPerfect into Word. You might have had to fix the formatting after that (and if you are using very advanced formatting options, you might have to do some format fixing with the other methods), but it is a great deal less work than retyping teh whole document!
Many thanks to everyone. It turned out to be MS Works – which, interestingly, neither Word nor Open Office can convert from. He resent it in RTF and that worked fine.
Finally, converters for WordPerfect are shipped with Office itself, but are not installed / enabled by default. If you have your install media you can easily add them.
Really? On my version of Office (2010), I can just open up Word and then open the WPS file. It’s listed in the drop-down list of supported formats.
I’d find it pretty surprising if older versions of Word couldn’t do the same thing, seeing as Works is Microsoft’s upselling strategy for Office (it’s basically Office Lite). Not having Office be able to open its little sibling’s files would hamper that upgrade process.