You've come to this page because you've sent an electronic mail message to me containing a Microsoft Word document of some sort.
This is the Frequently Given Answer to such mail messages. You can read other people's similar answers on The GNU Project's web site, on The Elektronisk Forpost Norge's web site, on Tobias Brox' web site, on Jeff Goldberg's web site, on Tony Bove's web site, on Manuel M T Chakravarty's web site, on Tristan Miller's web site, on Samuel Tardieu's web site, on Neal McBurnett's web site, on Martin Vermeer's web site, and on Amanda Peet's web site.
Don't send Microsoft Word documents to me.
I cannot read them. Microsoft has deliberately not produced a Word viewing utility for my operating system of choice, in an effort to make me buy one of its operating systems instead.
I would not open them even if I could read them. They are a security hazard. Microsoft Word documents are often infected with Microsoft Worms. Microsoft Excel, Access, and Power Point files are also vulnerable to infection.
They contain extraneous bloat that wastes transmission bandwidth and clogs mailboxes. A Microsoft Word document is a terribly inefficient means of transmitting the data that are most often contained in mail messages. Usually those data are plain text. A Microsoft Word document is often vastly larger than the size of its actual text content would imply, because it contains a considerable amount of superfluous formatting codes, printer information, and so forth.
They can contain things that you wouldn't want to me to know. Microsoft Word documents are a privacy hazard. They contain hidden information about the author and the computer that was used to write them, enabling those in the know to pry into the author's activities and to track the origins of documents. Text that you think that you have deleted may still be embarrassingly present. The RISKS Forum is full of examples of private data being unwittingly exposed to others by Microsoft Word documents.
Even if I had Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Word, I still probably couldn't read them. The Microsoft Word document format is a secret, undocumented, and proprietary document format. (For comparison: The Adobe Portable Document Format is also proprietary, but it is not secret and it is publically documented.) Moreover, it changes from one version of Microsoft Word to the next. You have no guarantee that your documents, created on your version of Microsoft Word, are readable by someone else with a different, older, version of Microsoft Word. (This provides an incentive for users of Microsoft Word to step on to Microsoft's yearly upgrade treadmill, of course.)
I practice behaviour modification through negative feedback. You have an incentive to stop sending Microsoft Word documents to me. I will usually simply delete, unread, mail messages sent to me that contain Microsoft Word documents. If your message was about something that you wanted me to do, or to read, then it won't stand a chance of being done or read until you send your document to me in an appropriate format.