What To Do On a Mac When Someone Sends You a Microsoft Word File

What do you do if someone sends you a Microsoft Word document, but you don't use Word on your Mac? You've got several options for viewing these documents, copying text from them, and even editing and saving in Word format without needing to buy anything.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's talk about what to do when somebody sends you a Microsoft Word document but you don't have Microsoft Word. 
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Now many Mac users can relate to this. You get an email message and instead of there being text in the email there's this Microsoft Word document attachment. I've seen this done with corporate email, with email from schools, from organizations and clubs, or just from other individuals. I guess if you always had Word and used Word for lots of things it is just hard to fathom that other people may not use Microsoft Word at all. That's more likely if you're a Mac user. 
So if you get a Word document from somebody and you just need to read the text what can you do? What if you need to edit the text and send it back to the person in Word format? Well, there are some things you can do and they won't cost any money. 
Here I've got two documents to test with. One is a simple little letter with basically just some text in it. The other is a more complex layout document. If I were to look at them in Microsoft Word or the sender sends them to me as PDF's I would see them and they would look like this. There are some elements in this basic text document here and you can see this one's a lot more complex. Now if all I want to do is read what's in there then I can just use Quick Look. I can use Quick Look by just selecting the file and then using the Spacebar to bring up Quick Look. You can see here it doesn't show me the layout elements that are in this document. But I can see the text and I can select and Copy with Command C the text there if I need to use it somewhere. 
The layout document fares a lot worse. This is what it looks like here. So you can see it does actually include everything but it's all jumbled around. But I can still select some text if that's all I need and copy it. Or maybe all I need to do is see what this document was and now I can respond to the person's email. You can use Quick Look in the Mail app as well. So say if you've got these two documents as email attachments. You can select one, press the Spacebar, select the other, press the Spacebar and quickly view what's in there like that. 
Now another way to do it is to use TextEdit on your Mac. TextEdit can, of course, edit simple text documents but also more complex Rich Text format documents and it can import Word documents. So if I drag this to TextEdit you can see it opens it up and I've got everything available there. I'll do the same thing with this one here and you could see it doesn't look nearly as good and the images aren't included. But I can get to the text if I need it. 
For more robust support when importing you can use Pages instead. So now take this first document here, drag it into Pages, and it will open it up and you can see here it actually looks pretty close to the original document because Pages supports a lot of the same layout features that Word uses. You can see here a little report showing that it didn't quite get it perfect. In Pages you can simply use File, Open and then you can Open any Word document like that. So for this one you could see there are a few more things that it didn't get, like for instance you're missing a font that is in there. But if you look at the document it looks pretty close to what you would see in Word. 
Now the advantage to Pages is you can actually Save it out as a Word document. So if you needed to make changes to it you can go to File and you don't use Save, but instead use Export To and select Word. Now you can export it out as a Word document.
Now, of course, any elements that you lost in translation between Word and Pages won't be there in the new version of the document. But if you don't need precision it will work well enough to edit somebody else's Word document and then get it back to them in the format that they want. 
There's another options and that is to use Microsoft Word except that Microsoft Word costs money. You have to get a subscription to use it or purchase a stand-alone version of it. But at the beginning of the video I said you can do all this for free. Well, what I'm talking about is using Word without paying for it. So if you go to the App Store you'll find that you can download Microsoft Word from there. You don't have to get Word from Microsoft. You can get it from the Mac App Store. There's no price listed here. You get Word for free! Now to use some of the features you're going to need to a subscription. But the app itself downloads completely for free. 
So now let's launch Word and if I bring it up like this it seems to be full-featured version of Word. Let's go ahead and Open one of those documents. I'll select, on my Mac here, to Select a File. Let's open this first document here. It opens up in Word and it's going to look exactly as it should. Notice this message at the top, that a subscription is required to Edit and Save. So Yes, you won't be able to Edit and Save the document using Microsoft Word unless you have a subscription. But you can View it and view it in a more perfect way than any of these other options. Let's try that other document. You can see that looks perfect. 
Now unfortunately not only can't you Edit and Save but also it won't let you even Copy text that's there. So this is only a good option for simply viewing Word files. But maybe that's all you need to do in certain cases. 
There are some third party office suites that you can download for free and they will let you Open Word documents and you kind of get the same level of compatibility as Pages. Some things will work and some things won't. One of those is Libreoffice. You can get it from here and another one is OpenOffice. You can get it from here. Not only are these good for opening up an occasional Word document but they are pretty decent office app suites and they both have a lot of fans. Of course one of the most popular office suites is actually Goggle Docs, which you can use in a web browser for free. It's from Goggle. It's all online. So it is all done in a web browser. Guess what. You can import Word documents in here. So I'm just at docs.goggle.com. You can just have your free Goggle account with a few docs in here. You can actually go into the word processor into docs here. Go to File. Open. Then from here you can go to Upload and then you can drag a file into this. It will import it in. Then there you go. You've got your document in here. Let's try the other one. I'll go to Upload. Drag this one in and after I do that I'll see them both here in Recent Documents. You can see here it did a pretty good job of importing this layout document from Word. Then you can read it. Copy items from it. Then you can go to File and do Download. One of the options here is to download as Microsoft Word. So I'll use that and then it will go to my Downloads folder. I'll grab it out of there and if I look at this one, let's open it with Microsoft Word here to see how it really looks now. You can see, yeah, it lost a lot of its page layout elements here. It doesn't quite look right. So it depends on the level of complexity of the document. But note I could have gone to File, and Download and then downloaded a PDF and the PDF now is actually going to look pretty good. 
I want to finish with my favorite way to deal with getting a Microsoft Word document from somebody. That is to push back at the source. I love to go back to the person and say, Hey you sent me a Microsoft Word document. I don't like to use Word. Can you just send that information in the email message or perhaps give me a PDF instead. I always worry that while I know all these different methods for handling a Word document that other people that this person is sending Word documents to may not know how to handle it. So it is probably best that they think about it a little bit more before just sending a Word document to anybody. 
Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 3 Responses to “What To Do On a Mac When Someone Sends You a Microsoft Word File”

Sheldon

9 months ago

Thank bunches

Paul

Or you can download and use LibreOffice for free which is a complete Microsoft Office replacement. It works great on a Mac.

Bill McCart

Great overview of the options. It might be helpful to mention that Preview can’t open Word docs, something that many people may experience and find annoying.