You get a little warning there that things may look different but in the case of this document it actually looks very much like the Word document. So you can end up with a document that looks very similar. If you open it up in Pages it's going to be able to do a lot of what Word can do. Now, of course, the heavy hitter is to open it up in Pages. So if you get a few paragraphs of text without any layout or anything then TextEdit is a good option. TextEdit uses either Plain Text or Rich Text format which can be used on any machine. So now maybe I can clean this up and pass it along in a standard format. Images aren't even included that's in this document. Now TextEdit doesn't have the ability to display graphics and layout and stuff like Preview does. So if I want to pass it along, perhaps, I could pass it along in a good format rather than one people may not be able to access.Īnother way to do it is to open with TextEdit. I can't do much more with it but it's nice to have it open in an actual application here. Then Preview allows me to view the document. I'm going to Control click on it and choose Open With Preview. So you can drag and drop it onto Preview. You can scroll through it and see what's there.Īnother way you can view is Open With Preview. Quick Look gives you a nice window version of that. If I'm viewing say in Column View I'll see the Preview here on the right side.

Now at the same time you could also go in the Finder, I'm going to create a new Finder window here, and go to Desktop and there's the word doc. But if there's just basic information, and there are plenty of times when we get like three paragraphs of plain text in a Microsoft Word document, why they didn't just include this in the email as text I don't know, but it comes in Microsoft Word format and you can read it here using just Quick Look. That's just selecting the file and hitting the spacebar. Well, the first way I could view this is just by simply using Quick Look. I do have Microsoft Word so this is what it looks like in Microsoft Word. The first one is a pretty simple text document. But you can still view word documents and even edit them on your Mac with some software that comes installed on your Mac already or is just free. Even some people on Windows don't have Microsoft Word. People assume because their computer came with Microsoft Word or they got it a long time ago that everybody has Microsoft Word.

You get docs from teachers and parents at schools. Sometimes people just don't get that this is not a universal format.

Video Transcript: So from time to time you may get a document in Microsoft Word format. Check out Opening Microsoft Word Documents On a Mac at YouTube for closed captioning and more options.

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