.doc debacle
Heaps and heaps of Microsoft Word files fill my Documents folder. They’re everywhere. Old letters. Poetry compilations. What I’m looking for in the woman of my dreams. You name it.
But I’m on a Mac now. I don’t want to use Word anymore. So how do I efficiently turn all of these Word files into a Mac-friendly, Word-free format?
Either get office for mac, which is your easiest option, or get NeoOffice/J which is a port of OpenOffice to OSX. NeoOffice’s interface doesn’t follow the mac UI guidelines exactly, but they’re working on it.
I recommend MS Office for Mac unless you want to deal with the formatting of your more complex documentents getting all munged up when you convert.
Have you tried opening them in TextEdit? It’s in Applications/. As I have found, it works very well with Word docs. At the office, The copywriters use Word on the PC to craft their copy, and we’ve always (pre-OS X) used MS Word for Mac to open them so that we can flow them into our layouts. However, since OS X, we just use TextEdit now. It’s free, and already installed on your machine, and it can even read the formatting of the .docs.
Even MS Word for Mac jacks up the formatting when used between the two platforms. I’d say that TextEdit actually does a better job reading the formatting of PC .docs than Word for Mac.
So far I’ve tried a few in AppleWorks and the Word trial that came with the iBook, but I’d rather be able to just ditch Word completely and not worry about it. I’ll give the TextEdit a go – that sounds more what I was hoping to do anyway. I hardly ever use word processing now, everything is mostly text or HTML, with the now and again formatting that AppleWorks should handle fine.
Thanks gents!
OH MY GOD!!! I’ve had my computer for over 3 years and I didn’t know I could open Word docs in TextEdit! Thank you thank you thank you!!!!
I just tried this, but though it opens old ‘Micro-Swift” word documents, it comes up with too many excess symbols – to delete before it can be read! AGUH! Maybe because we’re up to Lion now?