MS Word 2007 makes files that are unreadable to users of other wordprocessing programs that's one of the "advantages"^TM of MS Software Bloat^TM. If you are the recipient of such files see my post: Dealing with MS Office 2007 documents there is now also a cure (not for the disease, that is probably incurable) but this particular symptom, if you are unlucky enough to be stuck with Word 2007 and for some reason do not want to change to OO, then there IS a fix, Native Winds of Montana have a little program that can undo the bloat and make your files readable again just download it Docx2RTF is free!