Any recommendations for recovering/converting a 1995 .doc?

[Will Collier]

I pulled up an old manuscript over the weekend, hasn't been changed since the last time I hit Save in Word 4.0. The text does appear to still be in there, but I get formatting soup in every current application I've tried.

Anybody have a recommendation? I can fire up an old MacOS box and do a conversion to plain text if I have to, but I'd rather not have to.

[GGD]

Although I have no experience using this, the most common answer that comes up with old word (and AppleWorks) documents is to try LibreOffice.

[Zoidberg]

What about a general/generic text app, like BBEdit or CotEditor? or something like Bean?

[Acer]

GGD wrote:
Although I have no experience using this, the most common answer that comes up with old word (and AppleWorks) documents is to try LibreOffice.

Try this. I got it to open an AppleWorks database even, at least well enough to copy out the data.

But I'd even try the current version of Office. MS is much less cranky than Apple about supporting old formats of their own stuff.

[clay]

what about using something like this: https://www.zamzar.com to convert the doc to PDF (or docx) and then trying to see if that was able to save your formatting? Might be a "magic" combo that would bring formatting forward.

[Filliam H. Muffman]

Zamzar was successful in a previous thread about M$ Works.

Here is a thread about Word files. Convert very old MS Word file to modern word? http://forums.macresource.com/read.php?1,2321610

[Forrest]

I believe the version of TextEdit that shipped with OSX10.6.x could convert old Word .doc files to Word 2007 .docx files.

TextEdit in OSX 10.13.x does NOT have this feature.

[Bill in NC]

Forrest wrote:
I believe the version of TextEdit that shipped with OSX10.6.x could convert old Word .doc files to Word 2007 .docx files.

TextEdit in OSX 10.13.x does NOT have this feature.

Shoot, in that case the OP can PM it to me & I'll reboot into 10.6.8 for 'em.

[space-time]

Does Google Docs handle old documents?

[Will Collier]

LibreOffice fixed it on the first try. Thanks, everybody.

(This is quite a relief; I'm prepping a book for a 25th Anniversary digital re-release version, and got scared my old copy wouldn't be recoverable.)