I have a preloaded Microsoft Works program with Vista Home Premium on a new computer. Someone sent me a Microsoft Word document and I was very surprised to find that Word and the word processor which comes with Works are not compatible and I could not open the document. Is there a way of doing this? It ought to be compatible! Maybe Microsoft think we should all buy Microsoft Office as well. I can get a very hard to read and garbled version on Notepad.

Try and download a thing called "Microsoft Word viewer." It's basically a program that allows you to read Word documents but not edit them.

Morrigan

I came across this (link below). Its a way of opening a Word document in Works. I'm not sure if it would keep the formatting though. Perhaps the Word viewer would be better:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/841219

Many thanks. This has opened the document and preserved the formatting. It cannot be edited, but that is no matter.