What do you do with MS Word files?

[kalle314]

What do you do when you receive a MS Word file in the mail box?

Do you follow the advice of Richard Stallman and refuse to read it
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html
, or do you convert it to plain text? Or do you even use MS Office to view it?

[nocturn]

I just open it in OpenOffice.

Stallman makes a valid point, though most of the people sending them to me have no idea about fileformats or the existence of somehting lijke OpenOffice...

[badguyanil]

hmm interesting..well never thought or such a thing! Well i was infact using MS Word to view it. But will try to minimize its use!

[Engnome]

I open them in OpenOffice and save them in an open format. I have to return my schoolwork in a MS compatible format, preferably .doc. But my school can demand this as they do provide me with a laptop that has Windows + Office already installed. (wich I have removed btw) Some of my teacher takes open format as they use openoffice at home. My math teacher didn't complain over a .odt report i sent in.:)

[ProjectGod]

Re: What do you do with MS Word files?
i open it in MS Word and create / hide a virus in one of the macros. then i distribute it across the internet as an "ive_always_loved_you.doc" attachment.

[MedivhX]

I open them in OpenOffice!!!

[ssam]

open with open office.

then write a reply. take a screen shot of the reply and email it to them as a tiff.

[Erik Trybom]

I open them in Open Office or Abiword (which is faster). When I send documents to people I always use pdf format, either exported from Open Office or Latex. No one I know has ever complained about a pdf file.

Refusing to open MS Word files when you actually can is just silly. I do understand the issue, and I do think it's annoying, but being annoying in return isn't going to convince anyone of the excellence of free software. Being right is no excuse for being rude.

A polite request to use another format is OK though.

[foxmulder881]

What exactly are you trying to determine by conducting this poll? Curious!

[Sef]

I either open them in open office (mostly) or open them in abiword.

[Rhubarb]

Depending on who sent the doc file to me, I either send a reply in pdf, or copy the contents of the doc into the email as html.

What I do find amusing, is when I get asked for help by people that have m$ works installed, and can not open doc or xls files.
- I explain to them the closed monopolistic nature of m$, and offer to install Ubuntu / OOo.

[Klaidas]

All my word processing/presentations/other that kind of work is done in Windows ;)

[graabein]

We can't have public offices and schools demanding you post documents in Office formats. This is a serious issue.

[slimdog360]

When I can I convert them into pdf either from openoffice, or if it doesnt come out right I find a windows computer running ms office and install something to convert them into pdf from there.
http://www.primopdf.com/

[warlorddagaz]

Much as I would like to refuse to read them, this is often impractical, becuase most people who send me .doc attachemnts don't know about the alternative, and if I ask them to convert to open Office, they ignore me

[slimdog360]

Much as I would like to refuse to read them, this is often impractical, becuase most people who send me .doc attachemnts don't know about the alternative, and if I ask them to convert to open Office, they ignore me
tell me about it. When lecturers at Uni give out notes over the internet half the time its in a MS format.

[EdThaSlayer]

I have to use Word documents since it is the only **advanced** type of text document my school provides. Openoffice Document isn't supported at my school(couldn't hand in a few homework assignments due to that).I use both openoffice and abiword depending on how much time i have to open the word file!

[slimdog360]

I have to use Word documents since it is the only **advanced** type of text document my school provides. Openoffice Document isn't supported at my school(couldn't hand in a few homework assignments due to that).I use both openoffice and abiword depending on how much time i have to open the word file!
http://portableapps.com/apps/office/abiword_portable
you can always convert them from there into pdf

[Turtle.net]

Want it or not ... but MS Word is the most common format for the document in the industry.
So even if I really dislike MS Word (the software) I have to use it in my business (a lot of contracts require to exchange files in .doc and the templates our customers provide are hardly compatible with openoffice).

[_lynX]

Do you follow the advice of Richard Stallman and refuse to read it
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html
, or do you convert it to plain text? Or do you even use MS Office to view it?

While I do admire Stallman for his staunch views on things, I think he's being a little unrealistic here. At the company I work, almost all attachments are either .xls (Excel) or .doc (Word). For me to simply refuse to read it to make a point about my personal computer preferences is out of the question. Even with a few on-line communities that I am part of, a lot of the documents sent are .doc files, and I'd be missing out on pretty much the entire point of the community if I simply refused to read any of them.

[ScottMorris]

It depends on what OS i happen to be using when I receive or have to open a Word file. In Ubuntu I use OpenOffice.org, in Windows I use MS Word. I have even used Abiword because word was being stupid as it usually is.

[mdsmedia]

The "shred them" option isn't there so I open them in OpenOffice or Abiword.

While Abiword is a LOT faster than OpenOffice, it's also less stable, especially with larger documents. That said, it's more able to open obscure documents like .eml files.

[IYY]

I open them in a Linux word processor, but to be honest I get very few Word files.

[kuja]

Wait for it ... wait for it ... Delete At Will!!!

[ecosprog]

I ignore them. Anyone I know that would be sending me a document knows better than to send it in Word format.

I use .pdf format for all my document attachments and have never had a problem.

[zugvogel]

Usually the powers that be send me forms that I have to fill out by hand and return to them. Occasionally I explain that my group doesn't use windows or MS Office, and they then convert it to pdf, which is nice of them. Most of the time though I just print it out in the only office software available to me (openoffice) and return it like that. If it doesn't come out quite right (as is usually the case) I explain that we don't have MS office, and they'd be better to send it as pdf or in openoffice format, which "is free office software that anyone can run on any computer".

Maybe one day the message will filter through to the IT people; who have otherwise unfortunatly heavily invested in microsoft to run most of the computers and services here; about the waste of money and the existance of other software.

[23meg]

I ignore the unsolicited ones, and open the ones I must use with OpenOffice. I make a mention of using PDF or ODF instead of the Word format whenever it's not completely useless to do so.

[kalle314]

I use LaTeX to produce all my documents, so I have no use for a big application like OpenOffice that eats RAM and uses bandwidth for its updates.
I was very happy when I learned about the application Antiword, which converts .doc files to plain taxt from the command line, in just a second!


sudo apt-get install antiword

[chaosgeisterchen]

Open - edit - save

[djsroknrol]

I use whatever is available at the time....be it Word or OO.o, it's what works for me....

[bluenova]

I don't like the way most of the example responses in that first link say that 'I can't open your word document...'. It makes it sound like there is no way to open a Word document on Linux, which as we all know is utter bull, as you have the ability to read them out of the box. If I didn't know that I would think this Linux stuff is pretty crappy if I can't open other peoples documents with it.