Q: I'm running Vista Home Premium. When I try to open a .doc file with wordpad, openoffice or MS Word viewer, it opens up as a bunch of gibberish and random characters mixed into the file... any idea about a patch or download or something that can straighten this out??? I've opened the same files on other cpus with XP and they opened fine...
A: To solve this problem, I recommend downloading a freeware doc reader. You can search the Internet for some. OpenOffice is a suite of software that should open that file for you very well. It sounds like the file is in the older .doc format. Vista and Word should open that file because of it's built in compatibility mode, which has worked for me with Office 2007, and I am not sure why openoffice as you mentioned doesn't open it. Maybe a newer version will work. If you are sure the file is a true .doc file, and was not renamed to be a .doc file, it should be ok. Try freeware doc readers.