Help Manco With His Word Problem

[WWW.SETH.COM]

I have a problem I was wondering if you bleeding-edge tech guys could help me out with. My Dad recently sent me a .doc file and a .txt file and when I tried to open both, they were kind of corrupted. There was an extra space between each character. Some of the symbols had been switched to arcane runes of an unknown origin. He sent them to me using the Microsoft Word program on his imac and I was trying to open them either with my own word program or Microsoft Works. Either way produces the same result.

I know very little about computers other than the general ways to operate them. Does this problem have a simple solution that is escaping me as I slip farther and farther down the evolutionary ladder? Is there some easy program to download to fix this? Please help.

[TemporalRift]

Works is too ancient to handle Word's newer document formats. I would recommend downloading and using the free Office suite OpenOffice, which has full support for Word and numerous other formats

http://www.openoffice.org/

[Shire Le Buff]

Try opening with Notepad to see if the problem remains there as well.

[Violent Unrest in Allentown]

I'd advise telling him to resave the Word document as "Windows Friendly."

The compatibility can be determined in the Save As dialogue.