Annoying technical problem.

I have been sent a form that needs completing. It’s a .doc, but an old one. So old that even current Word drops a lot of the formatting when updating it to a workable new format. It’s not backwardly compatible, forwardly compatible or Luddite compatible. I’m guessing it’s something pre-war (you choose which one).

I’ve asked the sender to save it on their system as a PDF which can be completed anywhere, but I suspect they’ll have the same issue.

If I print to file, it generates nasty page breaks in inconvenient places.
In pages, it drops even more formatting.

Any ideas? An online option? There used to be a couple of MS hosted online facilities for editing and filling in forms in word format, but my links all want me to sign up with 365 for some ridiculous subscription.

i use word 97 ( doc.) and still love it, took awhile to teach my laptop running windows 11 this is what i prefer>
rather than trying to convert everything to docx.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=convert+doc.+ ... ntp&ia=web

@Freightdog
Try opening with Google docs and then printing, could work

If not, they can save a .doc to pdf, either convert to pdf online (smallpdf works) or print to pdf

Try Open Office
https://www.openoffice.org

It’s free. It has built in converters for .doc format.

Word 95 and Word 97 both use .doc format, but slightly different.

Please let us know how it goes.