Converting Word for DOS Documents

If you have many old Word 5 (a DOS version of Word) files available, you may be wondering how to convert them for use with the latest versions of Word. Unfortunately, Microsoft doesn't provide conversion filters for Word 5 in these later versions of Word. There are two approaches you can take, however.

First, you can download a file converter from Microsoft. If you search the Microsoft Knowledge Base, you won't find any information about doing conversions from Word 5. An older converter is still available, however, if you know where to look. The converter name is WDSUPCNV.EXE, and it is available at this Microsoft FTP site:

ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/softlib/mslfiles/wdsupcnv.exe

This file contains a number of different converters, one of which is called DOSWRD32.CNV. This needs to be copied into the same folder where your other text converters are located. Put the CNV file into this folder:

\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Textconv

Once in place, you can restart Word and you can open any Word 5 document, with almost no loss of formatting.

The other potential solution is to convert the Word 5 files to RTF format, and then load them into your newer version of Word. This assumes, of course, that you still have Word 5 available on a system somewhere. Many people prefer this method, as it is a way to make sure there is nothing lost in the translation to newer versions of Word.

You should note, however, that Word 5 is quite old, and there have been several changes to the RTF format in the intervening years. This means that for some complex formatting, you may encounter some problems in going directly from Word 5 RTF to the latest incarnation of RTF used in Word. The only solution in this instance is to find some older versions of Word and do intermediate conversions to those versions of Word. This gradual conversion approach is likely to provide the most satisfactory results, but it can be the most difficult because you need to find systems that have the older versions of Word on them.