Converting WordPerfect docs to Word

One question I get asked a lot is, “What’s the best way to convert an existing WordPerfect document into Word?”

There are a lot of ways of doing this — some better than others.  Here, I rate the choices from worst to best.

“Save As Word” within WordPerfect. Quite frankly, this is my least favorite choice.  Exporting your document from within WordPerfect into what WordPerfect thinks is a “Word” format almost invariably results in formatting issues.

Third-party conversion software. Somewhat better than using WordPerfect.  Most documents should be fine, but with more complex formatting, there could still be some issues.

Retrieving a WordPerfect document using Word. Letting Word do the converting is usually a better choice, in my experience, than letting WordPerfect do it.  The formatting codes tend to be translated far better.  Be sure to save the document under a different name with the .doc filename suffix.

Copy-and-paste. This is my preferred method — highlighting the text in WordPerfect, using CNTRL-C (or Edit, Copy) to copy the text, switching over to Word, then using CNTRL-V (or Edit, Paste) to paste the text into a blank document.  I find that, even with fairly complex formatting, Word will render the text pretty much the way it appeared in WordPerfect.

Even if you use the copy-and-paste method, you might run across the occasional formatting issue.  Just be sure to eyeball your document thoroughly (in Print Preview if possible) before printing.

What challenges have you encountered in converting existing documents to Word?

Related posts:

1. Cutting and pasting from WordPerfect (or elsewhere)
2. What you can (and can’t) open in Word
3. So, you miss Reveal Codes in WordPerfect?
4. Putting dates in Word documents
5. Changing text case in Word