Hello, I am a new member and I am having a problem opening some files in MS Word Starter 2010. When I click on a file in my documents [the icon is a orange box] this comes up: "The MS Office product necessary to open this file is not installed on your computer" then there are 3 boxes with:
1.] I already purchased Office 2010------Activate
2.] Go online to purchase Office---------Purchase
3.] Try Office free for a limited time------Try

I have had my computer for 3 years and haven't had a problem with opening files in my documents and MS Word Starter was on the pc when I purchased it. The files I am trying to open are old ones I haven't opened in quite awhile. My question is, do I have to go online and purchase Office to open these files? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Does Word on your PC run normally for other files?

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

Thanks for your quick response. Yes, no problems opening up some of the files.

Are you sure, then, that the problem files are actually Word files? You say "the icon is a orange box" - but Word documents don't have orange icons.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

Yes I'm sure. Most of these files are recipes and some saved letters. I do notice that these files have a "docx" at the end of each one except for the old ones going back to 2004. I don't know what docx means.
Sometimes I would copy some thing from the web for a quickie in wordpad and copy it and paste it in MS Word if I want to do something more with it. I just don't know what to do and hope you can help me.

The docs extension represents the new file format that Word 2007 & later user. If you're unable to open these, that suggests your Office installation has been damaged. This could be the result of an Office update that was released on 10 September. One of it's symptoms with the Office Stater was to tell people they needed to purchase an upgrade. Assuming that the case here, you should be able to repair Word by clicking on Start|Run then typing 'winword.exe /r' (without the quotes) to tell Word to re-register itself on your PC. That should fix the file associations. Hopefully, Miscrosoft's next round of updates (due out next week) will fix whatever else the September one broke.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

Ok! I will try what you suggest. Thanks so much for the help.

Hi, somehow I couldn't get that to work. Decided to play around a bit. I right clicked on one of the files, clicked on "Open With," then "Choose default" and then clicked on "MS Office Client Virtualization". It worked! All the files with a orange box turned blue with the "W". Now I can open all the files that wouldn't open before.
I do want to thank you for taking your time trying to help me.