I have an old 3.5 floppy with some files from windows 95 or 98, I can't
remember which. I now have office 2000 and want to retrieve the info from the
disk. When I try to open it it just displays gibberish.

Neither Windows 95 nor Windows 98 is a version of Word. Word 97, 2000, 2002,
and 2003 share the same file format, so you can easily open files from all
versions. Word 2000 should also have no trouble with documents created in
Word 2.0, 6.0, or 95. I strongly suspect that I have some Word 2.0 docs that
I'm still opening in Word 2003.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
Word MVP FAQ site: http://word.mvps.org
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.

"jc" wrote in message
news
I have an old 3.5 floppy with some files from windows 95 or 98, I can't
remember which. I now have office 2000 and want to retrieve the info from
the
disk. When I try to open it it just displays gibberish.

Hi jc-

*Do Not* attempt to open the files directly from the floppy!!! If you have
tried to do so the files may be damaged already, but hopefully not.

Copy the files from the floppy to your hard drive, then use FileOpen (or
equivalent) from within Word to open the files. If they still appear as
'gibberish', they may be corrupt or it might be a font problem. If they are
readable, Save any changes to the respective copies on your HD, then use
Windows to copy back to a removable disk if necessary.

The same applies to _any_ removable media... Zips, CDs, DVDs, but floppies
are among the worst offenders.

If there are any files that the above approach will still not open, you can
try FileOpen and change the 'Files of type:' at the bottom of the dialog box
to 'Recover text from any file' as another option.

Good Luck |:)

"jc" wrote:

I have an old 3.5 floppy with some files from windows 95 or 98, I can't
remember which. I now have office 2000 and want to retrieve the info from the
disk. When I try to open it it just displays gibberish.