[Solitaire1]

Originally Posted by kennyc

Oh my yes! I started with Wordstar before Windows, before MSDOS, on CP/M!

used Wordstar for most of my writing some 15 -20 years ago and in fact have files, I've not found any way to convert to ........take a deep breath......WORD!

I too somewhat despise MS Word but just use the basic features and I prefer using Open Office because it pokes a stick in the dominance of MSWord and the latest version is completely free and compatible with Word files!

I'm an old Wordstar fan (it was my first MS-DOS word processor), and Wordstar 4.0 is my favorite version. It fixed all of the weaknesses of Wordstar 3.3 and didn't try to be Wordperfect like version 5.0 did. One of my favorite features was on-the-fly mail merge (tell it to print a document, it asks you questions that you answer, merges your answers into the document in the preset places, and prints the document).

I am also a fan of WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS (WP5.1) and for me it is the best word processor I've ever used. When I was using MS Word 2003 there were still features of WP5.1 that were not available in that version of MS Word (such as the ability to precisely position the text anywhere on the page, a handy feature for filling in preprinted forms).

As far as converting old Wordstar files, I'm using StarOffice 8.0 (the commercial version of OpenOffice.org) and it has the ability to open Wordstar files going back to version 3.3. Also, it might be possible to extract the text from the files since they are basically just plain text files with codes inserted (much like HTML and their tags).