As Yo Are About, Chico,

[Obiter]

have you any advice on the last thread on this post? I am terrified of sownloading stuff with which I am not familiar.

http://www.theanswerbank.co.uk/Technology/Question1365149.html

[wolf63]

He was here a little while ago - maybe out walking the moggies.

[Buenchico]

. . . or simply being bossed about by the moggies, as usual, Wolf 63 ;-)

I looked at that thread earlier this week, Obiter, and decided not to post as I thought that all of the main options had been covered but, since you ask, here are my thoughts:

Methyl may well have been correct in suggesting that you'd accidentally downloaded the wrong version of OpenOffice. I suggest trying a fresh download, taking care to ensure that 'Windows (EXE)' is selected:
https://www.openoffice.org/download/

Other than OpenOffice there are two highly recommended office suites. The first is LibreOffice (as recommended by both Danny and Hans on your earlier thread):
http://www.libreoffice.org/
(When Lotus gave up trying to compete with Microsoft Office, they placed the source code for their highly-praised Lotus 123 office suite into the public domain and LibreOffice has been derived from it).

Kingsoft Office Free (as recommended by Huderon) is a much newer entrant to the field (from a well-respected Australian software firm) but has been widely praised in the technical press:
http://www.kingsoftstore.co.uk/kingsoft-office-freeware.html

All of the above assume that you require a full office suite. If you ONLY need a word processor (and no spreadsheets, databases or presentation software) you might want to consider Abiword. It's been around since Fred Flintstone first booted up the earliest PC but it still has plenty of fans (including JennyJoan, I believe):
http://www.abiword.org/

All of the above are perfectly safe downloads, so simply see what is best for you.

Er, now can I go to bed please?
;-)

[Old_Geezer]

For what it's worth when my employer upgraded the MS Office suite and we started creating .xlsx spreadsheets (that my home suite could not read) I downloaded WPS Office. I don't use it much but it seems ok to me. (Opens the darned new format anyway, and I've got into the habit of not resaving them as .xls but retaining them as .xlsx. I'm assuming the word processor is equally competent.)

[Obiter]

Thank you for your responses.