Forum Discussion

mr__ed's avatar
mr__ed
Explorer
Feb 22, 2014

Trouble Opening WPS File With Windows 8

Well, I'm still on a learning curve with Windows 8. Here's the problem: I insert a thumb drive in the computer and try to open a WPS file. I choose Wordpad as the program to open it and when the doc opens it appears as a lot of gibberish. The appearance is many letter Y's in a row followed by other gibberish.

I tried formatting the thumb drive (a San Disk) and trying again but the results are the same when I try to open the doc in Win8.

If it means anything, I installed the word document on the thumb drive using my older laptop running XP before attempting to open it in the new computer running Win8. Word Processor in XP is a common doc and should open without a problem in Win8 IMO. Any ideas?
  • 1492's avatar
    1492
    Moderator
    Feb 23, 2014
    mr. ed wrote:
    I just installed Open Office on my new computer and when I try to open the WPS file with that program it doesn't show up on the options. Why doesn't my computer recognize the newly installed file? Thanks again for your assistance.

    Because OpenOffice doesn't support Microsoft Works files. That's why I posted the link for LibreOffice which does.
  • mr__ed's avatar
    mr__ed
    Explorer
    Feb 23, 2014
    OK,I tried this. I converted the file from my XP computer to PDF and now I can open it with Adobe Reader on my new laptop. In the future I'll be typing documents on my new laptop so I shouldn't have any trouble. Thanks to all....
  • mr__ed's avatar
    mr__ed
    Explorer
    Feb 23, 2014
    I just installed Open Office on my new computer and when I try to open the WPS file with that program it doesn't show up on the options. Why doesn't my computer recognize the newly installed file? Thanks again for your assistance.
  • eubank's avatar
    eubank
    Explorer
    Feb 22, 2014
    WPS files are for Works, an entirely different program from WordPad.

    My suggestion is to locate a file converter so that you can convert your files to a format of some current word-processing program like Word, OpenOffice, etc.

    :)
    Lynn
  • 1492's avatar
    1492
    Moderator
    Feb 22, 2014
    A .WPS file extension is a Microsoft Works document. You many be able to open it using Microsoft Word. If you don't have MS Word, then you can install the free LibreOffice which will open Works documents. Make sure to save it in a Word format such as .doc or .docx.

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