Microsoft Works is a software package, and so it is Microsoft Office. Microsoft Word is part of Office's package, so it has nothing to do with Works. You can download openoffice, wich is free, and you will be able to work with doc documents. It is almost the same as Office, just for free. :)

Thank you for replying! Sorry for the delay.

Is it available directly from Microsoft?

What exactly is the difference between Word and Works?

Think of it as the difference between a .jpg and a .gif. It makes little difference to a person who just wants to look at pictures, but for people who make a lot of documents there are formatting, size, and other differences.

So no, they're not the same. If your formats are incompatible and you're looking to just transmit information, try the word pad or notepad in the accessories of Microsoft operating systems (assuming you have a pc from above info). If you need to transmit format, too, you can either transfer the document to open office, a third formatting program that is free to download and use, or, if you have a full adobe acrobat volume, try printing to pdf (from the print menu, instead of selecting a printer select adobe pdf), which can be read by anyone who has adobe acrobat reader.

Thank you! I'll have to play around and see what I can do. :-)

The standard document format of Microsoft word is .doc, which most other programs can open, but if the file is fancy - full of macros, tables, colours, pictures, etc - it may not work right. However, you can certainly open .docs in Wordpad, which is a standard part of any Windows computer, and which you will find under Accessories. It's possible that you can open them with Works, too.

If you intend to do a great deal of word processing, I second the recommendation for Open Office, which is a free, open-source and highly sophisticated word processor; but if you only want to read and write basic documents, there's probably no need for anything beyond Wp or even Notepad, which can handle plain text .txt documents as well as .rtf documents, which are plain text documents that allow you to use different fonts and colours (.rtf is a good standard format that can be used by people on Macintosh as well, and produce smaller file sizes).

Edited at 2009-01-06 09:00 am (UTC)

Thank you for all the advice! :-) I think perhaps we'll end up buying Word.

Yes, Microsoft Works includes Microsoft Word. The only difference is that Microsoft Works is sort of a group of software including Powerpoint, Excel, Microsoft Word, and various other software items depending on which Microsoft Works version you have. Mostly likely you have Microsoft Works 9.0 if your OS is Windows Vista.

Hope that helps!

Sorry ignore my above answer, that's what I get for thinking I know about Microsoft software when I'm a Mac user.

Found this answer at Yahoo answers, maybe it will be more helpful to you:
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080601023024AASadDm

Naw, don't worry about it. :-)

Thank you for taking the time to help! I do appreciate it. :-D

No. They're completely different. I *think* that you may be able to export files from Works to Word. Works is pretty much it's own file format. I *adore* the Works database, though.

You adore it, really? How come?

As a flat file DB you can't beat it. It's better than Excel or Quattro Pro because you're only dealing with the specific columns that you need instead of all this other junk off to the right. The search facilities are better for DB stuff than Excel/QP -- and the rows autosize themselves! Access for a flat file isn't as good -- each record is the same size as all the other records. If *this* record needs to be 3 lines high coz it's got lots of stuff in it, Works will do that -- Access makes *all* the records 3 lines high (once you finally figure out how to make Access wrap text in a record so it doesn't have to be a gazillion characters long.

Now, if you're linking 2 DB tables, that's a different can of worms entirely.

Ooooh, I'm afraid that went way over my head, lol!! ;-P I'll just take your word for it. :-)

A "flat-file db" is what you build if you use Excel to maintain database.