I don't know why the Ted misses the obvious solution to BOTH the old file types he mentions (and a boatload of others, including WordPerfect): OfficeLibre. Granted, I'm not sure about the drawings he had trouble with translating from Appleworks, but everything else should work. And he'll likely get a much better result with the old Word docs than he will if he uses Word's "recover text from any file" which generally gives you pages and pages of formatting gibberish and completely unformatted text output.