Vista and .doc files HELP...?

Question

I'm running Vista Home Premium. When I try to open a .doc file with wordpad, openoffice or MS Word viewer, it opens up as a bunch of gibberish and random characters mixed into the file... any idea about a patch or download or something that can straighten this out??? I've opened the same files on other cpus with XP and they opened fine...

Answer 1

To solve this problem, I recommend downloading a freeware doc reader.  You can search the Internet for some.  OpenOffice is a suite of software that should open that file for you very well.  It sounds like the file is in the older .doc format.  Vista and Word should open that file because of it's built in compatibility mode, which has worked for me with Office 2007, and I am not sure why openoffice as you mentioned doesn't open it.  Maybe a newer version will work.  If you are sure the file is a true .doc file, and was not renamed to be a .doc file, it should be ok.  

Try freeware doc readers.

Answer 2

You have to reinstall Vista

Answer 3

If the file was produced with an older version of Microsoft Word (pre-2007) it was based on Microsofts older standard for document storage and as such it made it readable in other systems, but not vista.

With the launch of Vista and Office 2007, Microsoft changed the document standard to Open XML (which has now become an international standard, to the chagrin of many).  Because this document standard is different, it can only be opened by programs that have the capabilities to understand Open XML.  Because this launched with Vista and Office 07, these were built in as defaults.

This is probably why you experience an issue opening the document on a Vista machine.

Answer 4

If it's a Word document, you need Word to open it.  That simple.  If you open it on a computer that has Word installed, Word opens it, since .doc is the default Word document extension.