I have an archive on a NAS drive with about a thousand Word docs on it.
They were all produced in Word for Windows from 2000-2016.
Last year the NAS disc was dying and For ease I copied them to my Mac backup disc, replaced the disc and copied them back. All was well … I thought.

On trying to open one on my PC this morning, Word 2016 wanted to covert it and all I could see was Mac OSX and lots of symbols.
Word 2019 on the Mac opened it fine in compatibility mode.

Is there any global way of addressing the problem so that the PC can recognise them as ‘Windows’ files again?

Any help welcome
Thanks
Pete