Having trouble opening word documents.

I recieved an iBook G4 recently. I've used PCs my whole life, but who can pass up a free computer? I use my laptops to write stories mostly, so I have a bunch of old Microsoft Office files I wan't to edit.

The previous owner installed Office for mac. I'm not sure what year it is. I tried to open my old files by changing some of them from .docx to .doc

When I open a file it shows me a box that says "Convert" and a list of formats, but whatever one I pick it either can't open or it does open and gives me a bunch of gibberish.

Please help....

Try using TextEdit which is in the Applications folder ... also worth checking out are OpenOffice.org and NeoOffice, both which can open Word documents ...

Ensure you download the appropriate version of these apps according to the version of Mac OS X you have.

If you still have no joy, change the file extensions from .doc back to .docx and give it another go.

When you launch Office for Mac, look in the menu for Office ~> About Office to see which version you have ...

Keep us informed

My mac is running Microsoft Windows X for Mac, and my PCs both run Microsoft Office 2007. I tried opening a word document I typed on my mac on my pc and it opened just fine. I tried opening stuff in textEdit like you said but it still just gave me gibberish. I think it might have something to do with how old the Word on the mac is, but I'm not sure.