Patrick, this is a profound question. What's especially irritating to me is that Mirosoft Word itself, in one of the modern versions, seems unable to do a good job reading docments that I wrote on a Microsoft Word program dating to 1984. It can't seem to handle special features I might have used then such as Italic. Even most of the basic formatting is gone. I've saved my ancient floppy-disk program and can use it, but to keep my journal up-to-date and accessible I will need to look at the writing with one program and put in paragraphing, etc., on a copy using a new version. Also, many of my past writings are in an early version of WordPerfect. Converting things to text files works and makes them readable by a Windows search engine. But this is worthless in terms of formatting, bold face, etc. Best, Joe