How can I view a Microsoft Word document from MS-DOS?

To open a file from MS dos what others commented is fine, But to answer your question can i VIEW FROM MS DOS yes its possible (only the text, no images no graphs) its a huge concept i hope you get it. Basically your MS DOS is a BOSS of all, Its language is entirely different from one use to create Applications like Microsoft Office. ALL applications have their own Language and run the batch and DLLs to communicate to BOSS (MS-DOS) to run in that computer. So you have to understand that When you open a text file in Microsoft Office Word or in another program on a computer that has system software in a language that is different from the language that was used to create the file the encoding standarded of that program determine how to represent the text so that it is readable.What appears to you as text on the screen is actually stored as numeric values in the text file. Your computer translates the numeric values into visible characters. It does this is by using an encoding standard. Click the Microsoft Office Button Office button image, and then click Word Options. Click Advanced. Scroll to the General section, and then select the Confirm file format conversion on open check box. Close and then reopen the file. In the Convert File dialog box, select Encoded Text. In the File Conversion dialog box, select Other encoding, and then select the encoding standard that you want from the list. Preferably OLD Word perfect for DOS 6.0 then Save. If you receive a message that states, "Text marked in red will not save correctly in the chosen encoding," you can select the Allow character substitution check box.When you allow character substitution, Word replaces a character that cannot be displayed with the closest equivalent character in the encoding that you chose. For example, three dots replace an ellipsis, and straight quotation marks replace curly quotation marks.If the encoding that you chose has no equivalent character for a character marked in red, the character marked in red will be saved as an out-of-context character, such as a question mark.If the document will be opened in a program that does not wrap text from one line to the next, you can include hard line breaks in the document by selecting the Insert line breaks check box and then specifying whether you want the line breaks to be delineated with a carriage return (CR), line feed (LF), or both, in the End lines with box. Now this file you can view from MS-DOS. It took me some time to type all this i hope its worth it and you understand it. read less

To view a Microsoft Word document, you need Microsoft Word,which is a Microsoft Windows program. Therefore,you cannot view a Microsoft Word document in MS-DOS. You can however start the Microsoft Word document from MS-DOS by trying the command below ----- start myfile.doc Here, myfile.doc is the name of the Microsoft Word document. Running this command causes Microsoft Word to start & immediately open my file.doc. read less