Transferring really old Word/TextEdit files to Catalina

I know for a fact that the free, 64-bit LibreOffice (v6.4.2) opens Word 6 documents from the mid-1990's and claims it can open Word 4, and Microsoft Works documents too. Apple tends to draw a line in the sand regarding age of Word documents, so even Preview, and likely TextEdit will follow Pages in informing you that the document is too old to open.

Once those older documents are opened in LibreOffice, and then resaved as contemporary .docx documents, then the open embargo with Apple applications, or Office 365, will end.

Word documents are not text files. Changing the extension won’t likely help.

(Not unless Microsoft suggests that rename, that is. They sometimes do weird things in Redmond.)

LibreOffice might read the contents, and that’s been able to open an assortment of older Office documents

If you only want the text, there’s a tool around for the command line called catdoc.

catdoc can extract text from various Office documents.

I’ve used catdoc many years ago and it worked, but have not used it again in quite some time.

Yes. Have you tried opening them in the free Office Suite, Libre Office?

The Office 365 version of Word will open them just fine. You may need to add the .doc extension for the system to recognize it is a Word document, though.

TextEdit isn't a perfect renderer of Word documents. It does the best it can.

If you cannot open them in 2011, then they aren't Word documents or they are corrupted. Do you remember what you used to create them?

Babette Gorman wrote:

Actually they were Word docs, but I don't remember which version, as the creation dates range from 1991-1998. I can open the ones created from the end of 1998 on. I'm going to try all of your solutions now and see if any of them works.

catdoc or LibreOffice, then. catdoc is a bit of a hassle if you’re not familiar with the command line, but has worked well with extracting just the text from older Word documents. It’s a path from Word to a traditional ASCII plain-text text editor. And LibreOfficeis intended tobe very compatible with Office documents.

What I would try first is changing the file extension on a copy of just one of the files from .doc to .txt and see if TextEdit will open it correctly.

FWIW, since you are certain they were Word documents changing the extension probably won't help as MrHoffman stated.

You are welcome.

FWIW, the OP said they added the .doc extension manually to files which may not have been Word files in the first place.

"They cannot be opened in Word 2011, which I found out *after* manually adding .doc to the end of each file name."

Ah, correct. I misread that.

This isn’t Word, and Word isn’t involved.

DEC used doc for a file extension years ago, as did some other vendors.

If you want rid of the junk and the contents as ASCII text, then the command-line strings tool will filter out most of that