More by David Pogue This article was originally published with the title “How to Read Old MS Word Files When Word Says You Can't” in Scientific American Magazine Vol. 317 No. 5 (November 2017) ...

Sometimes when you receive a Word file as an attachment and try to open it to edit it, you cannot do it since it opens in the ‘Read-only’ mode. Open the Word file on your computer.

If you repeatedly revise a Word document and save it as a separate file, it is difficult to keep track of the changes. We will show you how to display the changed passages.

For example, if you want to locate and open a .doc format in Writer, select "Microsoft Word 97/2000/XP (.doc)" from the menu. Locate the document on your hard drive using the Open window.