Open all your old office files

Obsolete media formats like Betamax cassettes or eighttrack music tapes are pretty useless unless you have the means to play them. The same goes for old digital file formats. If you don’t have a program that can read your files, you may run into trouble next time you want to open them.

This is a particular problem with office tools, where files generated in older versions of your word-processing or spreadsheet programs may not be fully supported by the current versions of the same tools, and where discontinued software has effectively made once popular formats redundant.

If you’re lucky, opening an older office file in a newer program might result in a few easy-to-fix formatting problems, where fonts have been substituted and so on. Alternatively, you might just get reams of garbled text and security warnings – or not be able to open it at all. Here, we explain how you