How to open a doc file
Files with the doc extension are documents created by Microsoft Word. However, sometimes there are situations when this program is not on the computer. In this article, how to open a doc file.
First of all you need to talk about the program Microsoft Word, which is included in the Office suite of Microsoft Office. With this program you can work with doc-files, while doing any editing operations. However, the software package Microsoft Office is paid. Therefore, in order to avoid possible problems and not to install the hacked version of the program, it is better to use a free alternative.
Open the doc file using the free program OpenOffice.org Writer. The distribution of this application can be downloaded from the official site of the application. The installation procedure is the same as for any other program for the Microsoft Windows operating system.
After installing the application OpenOffice.org Writer run it. A dialog box appears, which will prompt you to perform one of several actions. We will be interested in the button for opening a new document, near which it will be written «Open a document». We click on this button. After that, another dialog appears, in which you will be asked to specify the path to the desired folder and select the desired file. Then click the "Open" button, and the selected doc-file will open. Now you can edit it.
It is worth noting that since May 2012 this application is called Apache OpenOffice.
Another free word processor is LibreOffice Writer. This editor became a branch from the development of OpenOffice.org Writer. Both software packages are cross-platform applications. This indicates that they will work not only under Windows, but also under Mac OS X, and also under UNIX-like operating systems.
You can also open the doc file using a program that is built into the Windows operating system. It is called WordPad. Of course, this text editor does not hold up to the functionality before the Microsoft Word program, however it has the ability to change the font and color of the characters, and also to align the text. Only WordPad for Windows 7 can work with doc and docx formats.
In order to open the doc file, you can also use online services. However, it will take your computer to be connected to the Internet. Services of this kind can be found on the websites live.com and docs.google.com. Both services require mandatory authorization, so you should complete the registration procedure before starting work.
If you do not need to edit the doc-file and only need to open it to read this or that text information, it will be enough to download and install the free program Word Viewer. This application, like Word, was developed by Microsoft specifically to print and read documents.
As you could see, opening the doc file is quite easy. In addition, for this it is not necessary to install Microsoft Word - the program for which this file formatis standard. On the Internet you can easily find other software, for the use of which you will not have to pay. As for the capabilities of such programs, they are not inferior in functionality to a powerful word processor such as Microsoft Word. We hope that the information in this article will help you choose an application for opening doc-files.
