Seems like it may have been an encoding issue if these are shared files. This help section I accessed through Word 2016 might help. If you select the Unicode text, does that not work? See if anything here helps, but again, you may have to try using another word processor to attempt to open, and then save in a Word format and then try to open again in your version of Word.
Typically, you can share text files without worrying about the underlying details of how the text is stored. However, if you share text files with people who work in other languages, download text files across the Internet, or share text files with other computer systems, you may need to choose an encoding standard when you open or save a file.
When you or someone else opens a text file in Microsoft Word or in another program — perhaps on a computer that has system software in a language that is different from the language that was used to create the file — the encoding standard helps that program determine how to represent the text so that it is readable.
Understand text encoding
Choose an encoding standard when you open a file
Choose an encoding standard when you save a file
Look up encoding standards that are available in Word
What appears to you as text on the screen is actually stored as numeric values in the text file. Your computer translates the numeric values into visible characters. It does this is by using an encoding standard.
An encoding standard is a numbering scheme that assigns each text character in a character set to a numeric value. A character set can include alphabetical characters, numbers, and other symbols. Different languages commonly consist of different sets of characters, so many different encoding standards exist to represent the character sets that are used in different languages.
The encoding standard that is saved with a text file provides the information that your computer needs to display the text on the screen. For example, in the Cyrillic (Windows) encoding, the character Й has the numeric value 201. When you open a file that contains this character on a computer that uses the Cyrillic (Windows) encoding, the computer reads the 201 numeric value and displays Й on the screen.
However, if you open the same file on a computer that uses a different encoding, the computer displays whatever character corresponds to the 201 numeric value in the encoding standard that the computer uses by default. For example, if your computer uses the Western European (Windows) encoding standard, the character in the original Cyrillic-based file will be displayed as É rather than Й because in Western European (Windows) encoding, the value 201 maps to É.
To avoid problems with encoding and decoding text files, you can save files with Unicode encoding. Unicode accommodates most characters sets across all the languages that are commonly used among computer users today.
Because Word is based on Unicode, Word automatically saves files encoded as Unicode. You can open and read Unicode-encoded files on your English-language computer system regardless of the language of the text. Likewise, when you use your English-language system to save files encoded as Unicode, the file can include characters not found in Western European alphabets, such as Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic, or Japanese characters.
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If, when you open a file, text appears garbled or as question marks or boxes, Word may not have accurately detected the encoding standard of text in the file. You can specify the encoding standard that you can use to display (decode) the text.
Note: For Microsoft Office Word 2007, for the first two steps, click the Microsoft Office Button 
, and then click Word Options. Continue as below (click Advanced).
- Click the File tab.
- Click Options.
- Click Advanced.
- Scroll to the General section, and then select the Confirm file format conversion on open check box.Note: When this check box is selected, Word displays the Convert File dialog box every time you open a file in a format other than a Word format (Word formats include .doc, .dot, .docx, .docm, .dotx, or .dotm files). If you frequently work with such files but rarely want to choose an encoding standard, remember to switch this option off to prevent having this dialog box open unnecessarily.
- Close and then reopen the file.
- In the Convert File dialog box, select Encoded Text.
- In the File Conversion dialog box, select Other encoding, and then select the encoding standard that you want from the list. You can preview the text in the Preview area to check whether all the text is readable in the encoding standard that you selected.
If almost all the text looks the same (for example, all boxes or all dots), the font required for displaying the characters may not be installed. If the font that you need is not available, you can install additional fonts.
