Mikie you seem to be partly right. I have Windows 7 and Office 2007 and Wordpad will open my .docx files. After your post I tried opening my older .doc files and you are correct they open as gibberish. While I am alone in the wilderness I still feel more people should save in RTF format to get away from being tied to MS. I have a neighbour looking for work and often he cannot submit a resume as requested in Word format as he has a Mac so he was coming here to submit. I created his resume in RTF and now his Mac Pages program accepts that and so do the companies where he has applied so far.

Is this computer YOUR OWN PERSONAL COMPUTER owned by YOU, or does it belong to your employer? If it belongs to the employer or is connected to the employers network, then your company's IT department may have rules about what CAN and CANNOT be installed on their network and on computers owned by them or used on their network. If this is the case, your should talk to whoever in your building is responsible for computer services and find out if they can assist. It may be that the network doesn't recognize you as someone authorized to install new programs.

bob - I have 07 and that's why I couldn't figure out why I was having a problem. I just went to "help" at the top of Microsoft Outlook and clicked on Office Diagnostics and told it to diagnose and fix any problems. It went through the process and said there weren't any problems to fix, but now it works. I hope it sticks. Any ideas why that happened though? Laurie

I would have a difficult time justifying storing my personal info in space. So I would opt for Open Office. I know little about such things, but I would tend to take the opposite view for my own situation. I think of programs like Open Office (and email clients like Outlook) as kind of like a mail box one has at the end of one's driveway. It's at one's home, but a lot of things can go wrong on your end (weather damage, vandalism, etc.). Online storage (and webmail clients) on the other hand, to me, are like a Post Office (or safety deposit box). It's (supposedly) a safer place to keep one's 'stuff,' because it's in the hands of professionals -- with professional back-ups as well. Of course, that's just my view and anyway I'm not2bright. ;-)