I use pages as a word document. I am converting microsoft word documents over to pages. Most will work. But when I try to open documents a message will come up: "name of document" can't be opened for some reason." Is there a way to repair it?

You are moving away from a de facto industry document standard that can be opened by nearly every word processing application — to the Pages document format — perhaps the most proprietary format in existence, and with the least compelling strategic vendor product support on the planet. Why on earth?

You are never using Pages to create/edit/save Word documents, because Pages is not a Word clone, and never works in the native Word document format. Opening, or exporting a Word document is a translation of content event into/from the Pages internal document format. Apple makes no assurance as to the accuracy of this translation, and your document may look just fine in Pages format — until you export it to Word, and the layout and object positions are interpreted differently.

That Word document that you cannot open? Install the free LibreOffice Suite (a real MS Office replacement suite), and open, and then save the Word document again. Then retry opening in Pages. The best strategic plan would be to stop the conversion process to Pages, and just use your Word documents in LibreOffice. There is far better, and more actively developed Word support than found in Pages.

That is such a bad idea.

Why would you change your documents from something which nearly everyone can open and are reasonably secure and work to Pages 5?

Peter