Converting WinWord to MS Word

[James Scarbrough]

One of my employers finally entered the 21st century and gave up his 486 PC. All of his documents were on the PC, written in WinWord for Windows 3.1. The PC has since crashed and burned, so I can't access it from there. I need to know if there is anyway to convert these text files into MS Word or even notebook or wordpad.
Any assistance will be greatly appreciated.
James

[Jon Finley]

Word 95/97/2000/XP should be able to natively read the document in, then you can save it as the current version (or lowest common version).

If it does not, then find your Office install CD's, install additional components, and load ALL of the converters for Word.

Jon

[James Scarbrough]

Jon, Thanks for the suggestion, but it didn't work. The word processor was orginally created by Spinnaker Software, copyright 1993, but this company has gone out of business, apparently. The current Spinnaker Software company is unable to help as they state it is not their program. Anybody have any other suggestions/ideas?

[Roger Faucher]

James:

I assume you have no working installation of WinWord and no original media to install it. If that is true, have you tried opening one of the files in Notebook, Wordpad, or any of the possibilities under MS Word?

The PC that 'crashed': is the hard disk drive intact. Can you temporarily install it in a machine running MS Word (as a second drive, of course), then open the WinWord file in WinWord and cut/paste it into Word and save it as a Word file?

What is the filetype for a WinWord document? doc, txt, ?

Roger

[Ron Kinner]

There is a company which will do it for you:

http://www.acii.com/online.htm

Also I'm thinking the software was not called winword but may have been winworks.

You could probably just open these with an ascii editor. You would lose the format info but at least get the text. Something like anyedit should work. www.anyedit.org

Ron

[Jon Finley]

There is another option within MS-Word.

From within Word, select Open document, then on the file type drop down, select "Recover text from any file".

Jon

[James Scarbrough]

Thanks for all your help in this matter. Unfortunately I appear to be using a damaged copy of MS Word, since I was able to use another copy with little or no problems. Thanks again for all your help.