Open Old Office Files

Formats this handles

• Microsoft, pre-2007 — .doc, .xls, .ppt, .pps. The binary formats Office used before the XML ones, still everywhere in archives and government downloads.
• WordPerfect — .wpd. Dominant in law and government into the 1990s, and nothing modern opens it. Courts still circulate these.
• Publisher — .pub. Never had a viewer on any platform but Windows, and Microsoft never shipped a converter. Newsletters and parish magazines are full of them.
• Write — .wri. Windows 3.x era.
• RTF, OpenDocument, and the modern XML formats — for when you just need a PDF.

Why these stop opening

The old binary Office formats were never documented publicly until 2008, so support outside Microsoft was reverse-engineered and partial. Microsoft has also been progressively blocking them: recent Office versions refuse to open .doc and .xls files by default under a policy aimed at malware that used them as a delivery vehicle. The file is fine; the software has decided not to trust it.

WordPerfect and Publisher are a different problem — they were proprietary, they lost, and nothing inherited them. Conversion is the only route.

What survives, and what doesn't

Text, basic formatting, tables, and embedded images come through reliably. What can shift: elaborate multi-column layouts, text wrapped tightly around floating objects, unusual fonts that aren't installed on the server, macros (deliberately — they aren't executed), and tracked changes.

Converting to PDF is the safest option because it freezes the rendered result. Converting to .docx gives you something editable, at the cost of the layout being re-flowed rather than reproduced exactly.

Password-protected files

They will not convert, and this tool makes no attempt to break the protection. Open the file in something that accepts the password, save an unprotected copy, then convert that.

What happens to your document

It is converted on the server, because nothing in a browser can read these formats. The upload and the result are both deleted as soon as the download completes. Macros are never run — the converter is headless and scripting is disabled, which matters given how often old Office files carry them.