More by David Pogue This article was originally published with the title “How to Read Old MS Word Files When Word Says You Can't” in Scientific American Magazine Vol. 317 No. 5 (November 2017) ...

If Microsoft Word opens files in Read-only mode on your Windows PC, follow these instructions to fix the issue once and for all.

If you repeatedly revise a Word document and save it as a separate file, it is difficult to keep track of the changes. We will show you how to display the changed passages.