What program needed for .doc files

[Muse]

I'm visiting my brother next week and want to set up his desktop so he can read .doc files. I remember hearing about freeware that will enable this. What's out there? Not sure I want to go into a Best Buy or whatever just before Xmas and buy MS Word. Thanks for any help.

 

[secretanchitman]

wordpad (built into windows) reads .docs fine.

you can also download abiword (free) and openoffice (free).

 

[kamper]

OpenOffice.org does a pretty decent job. It definitely won't be perfect for complex documents but it is pretty decent.

 

[andy04]

I wont recommend Openoffice if you are not well versed with .doc files. by default it saves the docs in its own format which is not usable by the other popular software. Open it with word pad or get Microsoft Office from somewhere.
I have recomemded Openoffice before but most of them were not please and it almost seemed that they hated me...
Anyways... if you just want to read it once then Openoffice is good but dont make any changes and save it and specially dont send it to someone if you make changes.
heres the link - www.openoffice.org.

You can also directly open on the website - http://docs.google.com/ - again - Do not make any changes and send to anyone...

 

[Frodolives]

This might be way off the point, but just in case it's a situation where he can't open wordpad documents properly in XP, this might apply:

"Editing registry to fix richedit problem with wordpad, etc"

"To work around this problem, edit the registry and add the EnableLegacyConverters entry with a DWORD value of 1. To do this, follow these steps:
1. Click Start, click Run, type regedit, and then click OK.
2. Locate the following registry subkey:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Applets\Wordpad
3. Right-click Wordpad, point to New, and then click DWORD Value.
4. Type EnableLegacyConverters, and then press ENTER to name the new entry.
5. Right-click EnableLegacyConverters, and then click Modify.
6. In the Value data box, type 1, and then click OK.
7. Quit Registry Editor."

 

[Noema]

Both Abiword and Open Office work great, as mentioned. Google's Writely is a free, web based word processor which works too.

Lastly, Microsoft offers the free Word Viewer, which will allow you to open .doc files even without having Word installled. Useful for those rare files which the aforementioned apps fail to open correctly.

As you can see, you have a lot of free and legal options when it comes to word processing.

 

[SoundTheSurrender]

Openoffice.