A friend sent me a Word doc. Can I open Microsoft Word docs without Word? P.B., Missoula
You can open and save Word docs with TextEdit. It’s in your Applications folder. Start it up and then open a Word doc from the File menu using the “Open” menu item. (You may also be able to simply double click on the Word Doc, and if you haven’t made changes to the way OS X opens Word files, it may open right up in TextEdit.)
You can read the file, and if you need to edit it, you can. If you want to save the file again as a Word doc, you can use the “Save As…” command to get a Word document. There are three options for different Word file formats in TextEdit: .doc, .docx and .xml. Use the “Save As…” command, and then in the drop down, select the Word file format you need.