Thanks guys, you are the best. Pulled the file up on the XP machine, then did the "save as" to a ".dbase IV" format, then saved it to a flash drive. Plugged that into my Windows 8.1 machine and used Excel 2007 to read it. Then saved it to the Windows 8 document section, as an excel workbook file. It did truncate some of the far right side of the page but nothing serious enough to be concerned with.
Excel 4.0/5.0 (.xls) was not a choice, as I suspect the Works program I was using originally was before Excel 4 and 5 came out.
thanks again.