Opening Word '03 docs with ancient Wordpad

My wife uses Word 2003 at home. At work they only have Wordpad (XP-era, I assume; no Word of any kind) to use for word processing. She has occasionally taken documents that she has written at home to work, but when she opens them with Wordpad and prints them, the formatting is all messed up.

I guess the Wordpad that comes with XP isn't so hot when it comes to opening 2003 .docs and keeping their formatting. Is there another file format that Wordpad can read and which will rigidly retain all formatting (we're talking font size, italics, bold.... no tables, pictures, graphs, nothing complicated)? Would RTF work?

I've never tried "Open Office" so I can't speak for its capabilities.

Will they not consider using a freeware such as Open Office?

Naw, they can't install anything new on those terminals.

RTF maybe the only solution then. She could always use Wordpad at home on the documents that are to be taken to work. However, I'm not sure if there are differences from Win7 Worpad to XP Wordpad.

There are currently two betas of Office 2010 available for download, Office 2010 Beta & Office 2010 Beta Pro Plus (for developers & IT Professionals). It would be an excellent short term solution for her. The Pro Plus is packed with more features than I'll ever learn to use.

Open Office, it's certainly better than nothing, I had it for several years because I couldn't do better. But once you've had MS Office, chances are slim that you would go back to Open Office.

cat, If I understand the problem, she can't install any software.

He wants to know what file format to save files with so that wordpad will save the formatting and be interchangable in XP wordpad as well as Win 7's wordpad.

And I believe you do have the answer - RTF.

I was speaking of her home computer, MS 2010 Beta would be good for anyone at home.

Rich Text Format can work in some aspects, but I'm not sure whether the attached photos and stuff would work in WordPad.

Windows 7 WordPad has a lot more features than XP's WordPad

Maybe she should use virtual xp's wordpad at home so it will be compatible.

Shot in the dark. I do not know if thise legacy programs have this option, but. Save the word docs in txt format and, at work.open them with notepad?