Converting WordPerfect files to Word

Do you find that you still have documents in WordPerfect that you need to convert to Word? It’s a nuisance to maintain documents in multiple places or in multiple file types, so let’s take a look at a few ways to convert to Word. Third-party software can convert your files for you. And while this isn’t necessarily a bad choice, it can be costly and third-party software is not going to be infallible, especially when it comes to complex formatting. Saving as Word within WordPerfect might sound like an obvious and simple choice but we actually don’t recommend this option. Formatting issues almost always result because, quite simply, WordPerfect isn’t very good at converting to Word by itself.

Opening a WordPerfect file from within Word will work better than trying to convert to Word from within WordPerfect. I guess Word is just “smarter” software. When you access a WordPerfect document from within Word and save it as a Word document (.doc or .docx), the document should save pretty cleanly. Last but not least, there’s copy and paste. While this is more time-consuming than accessing a WordPerfect document from within Word, this option is going to give you the cleanest results. Simply highlight the text of your WordPerfect document and paste that text into Word. While you may not get fully perfect carryover, this method should yield the fewest formatting errors of the options provided.