Microsoft Word

Give the free LibreOffice app a try. It can open, edit and save Word files to Word formats or it's own format.

Also Pages should be able to open and save Word documents to Word format or it's own format. It's compatibility is not as complete as LibroOffice.

Kurt,

Does Word draw the line on document age, and refuse to open documents created as WordML (*.xml) or with pre-2000 creation dates on *.doc files? If so, then the fall-back tool would be LibreOffice.

Hi VikingOSX,

Not that I'm aware of. Though I think you mean depending on which direction the user is trying to go.

I had no trouble opening old .doc files in the current release of Office 365. Some I tested were back from 2001 and had no extension. Surprisingly, the OS still recognized them as Word documents. I've read more than once the OS no longer looks at Type/Creator codes. But that apparently isn't true, or it wouldn't know what to make of them at all without the extension.

Word 2007 Windows and 2008 Mac is when the XML format became the default as .docx files. Word 2004 can have XML ability added with an update. Older versions of Word won't know what to do with them. They'd have to be opened in a newer version of Word and then saved as a .doc copy.

Thanks. I used TextUtil to convert a Word .docx to Word .xml and LibreOffice 7.0.4 handled it. I don't have any real justification to have Microsoft Office 365 (now universal) on my Mac though certainly used it considerably in my former corporate enslavement years.

…though certainly used it considerably in my former corporate enslavement years.

😄 We use it to make sure we don't have compatibility issues with our clients. Once we shut the business down and retire not too many years from now, I'm not sure if we're going to continue with Office (MS says the name is now Microsoft 365), or switch to a free alternative such as LibreOffice. But I really like Outlook and detest Mail.

By opening them. Word can read any of its older formats.

If by old, you mean really old; as in, they don't have file extensions, all you should need to do is add .doc to the end of the file name.