I appreciate your help, but what your suggesting was something I did right off the bat when I discovered the problem. I have set Word as default. Ironically, Open Office and Libre, two programs I tried out, can be opened directly, but a word document can't. What I get is a blank word screen as I showed you. Since Open Office and Libre aren't the defaults I find your remedy dubious. Evidently, you don't need to have a document be the word processor to directly into it.

---- Wordsmasher