A screen cap below of the mentioned documents from 1986 open in LibreOffice. Word could not open them.

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1. RS, Author, Novelist (sfwrtr@eldritch.cafe)'s status on Wednesday, 10-Jan-2024 01:29:08 JST RS, Author, Novelist

   in reply to

   @stevendbrewer

   "You might find that Libreoffice is actually better at reading old Word files than Word."

   Yep. Word can't read files prior to 1994.I finally got my links to my writing ironed out and content backed up into the cloud (what a pain), though it is in Time Machine, so I installed the newest Mac version of #LibreOffice.

   I opened a 1992 file. Check.
   I opened a 1989 file. Well, all the lowercase "a"s are converted to circumflex characters, but I can work with that.

   I figured out (finally) how to search for dates on my Mac and found a story treatment named "The Revenger" (no extension, Mac naturally!). The date is Mar 25, 1986.

   It opened with a few box characters, but otherwise readable. It looks like my attempt at an Andre Norton type SF space opera. It even opened "Tree Castle", which is or probably was a Mac Draw document. It was dated Jan 1, 1986. It's my oldest document. I've a screen cap below of the mentioned documents open in LibreOffice.

   Yeah, for document conversion, LibreOffice rocks. The content of some of these old documents is amateurish; weird since I was already published.

   Still... No lost IP. This is a good thing.

   cc: @taur10 @alan

   #writing #writer #author #writersofmastodon #writingcommunity #fiction #writinglife #fiction #sf #ScienceFiction #spaceopera