Need some help with converting some files(hope this is right place to post)

Hey, I switched to Mac many months back when I bough a Macbook Pro before I went on my exchange to Finland. Anyways, many of my essay's which I typed on my windows machine back home are in Word Perfect Format (.WPD) and when I try to open using text edit for example it comes out all garbled and messed up. Does anyone know a text editing program which can open .wpd files and make them look normal or anything to use to make it so I can open them and they will look like the essay I typed?? Atm I have my friend on my windows machine back home e-mail me the files I need in rtf, but it gets anoying (since I zipped my whole my documents folder on my mac and it would be easier if I could just view them myself).

Thanks,

James

Openoffice.org can read WPD files, as far as I can see.

Abiword can also import WPD files.

Abiword is available at www.abisource.com and is a free open source word processor that can also read and write MS-Word format. In my experience it is excellent, and very, very fast.

OpenOffice? You probably want NeoOffice, the Mac version of OpenOffice. You can get that at www.neooffice.org. NeoOffice is a full fledged MS-Office replacement. It is excellent as well, but just about as slow as MS-office itself. It does have the virtue however of being open source freeware!

Another vote for Neooffice, handles just about everything. Works very well on all my systems. I don't find it "slow" at all.

Thanks alot for your input guys. I totally forgot that open office had a mac equivelent, should make my life much easier now haha.