Why can't I open my file in Word on a mobile device?

Applies To
Word for iPad Word for iPhone Word for Android tablets Word for Android phones Word Mobile

Having trouble opening a file? It’s probably because it has been saved in a file format that Word doesn’t support on your device. Find your device and then check the table to see if that’s the case.

Note

This article refers to mobile devices only. If you're having difficulty opening a document in Word on your PC see Open a document after a file corruption error.

File type Open and edit Open as read-only
Word documents (.docx) Yes Yes
Binary documents (.doc) No Yes
(Update to .docx format to edit)
Word templates (.dotx) Yes Yes
Binary templates (.dot) Yes Yes
Macro-enabled documents (.docm) No Yes
IRM-protected files Yes Yes
OpenDocument Text (.odt) No Yes
(Update to .docx format to edit)
PDF (.pdf) No No
Rich text files (.rtf) No No
Word XML, Word 2003 XML, or other XML files (.xml) No No
Hypertext markup language (.htm, .html) No No
Web pages (.mht, .mhtml) No No
Plain text file (.txt) No No
Works 6-9 documents (.wps) No No

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