Rays Fine Art wrote:
The motherboard on my wife's old computer died--New one had Windows 10 and Office10 pre-installed.  She made a mistake completing the Office installation and now it won't install.  She downloaded a copy of Open Office which will save a text document in formats up to Office 6.  For some reason it saves .rtf (rich text format) files as spreadsheets rather than as text files.

Now the questions:
Will Office 10 read files with a .doc extension saved in an Office 6 (or earlier) format?  If not, what formats can Office 10 read?   Will it read .rtf files created with Word Perfect (Important because she's a working actress and agents and casting agents will simply flip to "next" at pretty much any bump in the road if their version won't read the file she creates.  I could translate her Office 6 document to .rtf via my Word Perfect if that would work)

Help will be appreciated more than I (or my wife) can say.

Hey, Ray. So, in terms of the versions of Office mentioned above, are you sure about those? Office 10 (aka Office 2002) shipped in 2001, circa Windows XP. There's no such thing as Office 6, although there is a Word 6 version, which is part of Office 4.x (going all the way back to 1993-94). I suspect these are not the actual versions in question. The most current version is Office 15, aka Office 2013, released in 2012.

But all that notwithstanding, let's get to the nitty-gritty: what actual format does the document need to be in... doc? rtf? If we can narrow that down, that would be a good starting point.  Wordpad (which is bundled with Windows going way back) will natively create and read .rtf documents with a reasonable level of basic formatting.

Michael Bots wrote:
Open Office has a setting for that (file types / default file types)

Tools --> Options --> Load/Save --> (document type) Text Document --> (Always save as) Pick one (.rtf should be there)
or
File --> Save As     (pick file type)     (from any document you have open)

which led us to where our problem really lay  (The fact that neither of us has stayed current with the profit-producing updates---I'm still using Word Perfect and bemoaning the loss of XP---simply added to our confusion)  Open office looks like it will do everything that she needs to do including accessing a wide range of formats.

Thanks again.