Downloading a word.doc to my MacBook

I was wondering if anyone knew why my word documents stopped downloading as word documents but now they automatically transfer over to pages and download to my files as pages. When I was searching up why it did this everyone told me to highlight a doc in my files, click the file tab on the top left, then hit "get info", and when the pages app drop down appears click the "open with" option and select MS word/ word documents. But when I tried doing that I have no word doc option It only has the option pages as a default option and the text edit app as an option. Is this because I don't have MS word app on my computer, just google docs. I didn't know if it was another mess up in my settings or because of an apple update, but if anyone could help me save a word doc as an word doc without transfer as a page in my files I would appreciate it.

MacBook Pro 14″, macOS 14.1

Posted on Nov 30, 2023 07:31 AM

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Posted on Nov 30, 2023 08:16 AM

Okay, just to get a better understanding my downloads of a word.doc are opening in Pages because that's my default opening application for word documents, and I also don't have the MS word app installed. Although I use the MS word.doc website and I have Google.docs installed, my documents I download from those two sources (MS word.doc and Google docs app) will still be open through Pages since Pages is the default opening application and since I don't have the MS word installed to change that default setting?! Thank you.

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Nov 30, 2023 08:16 AM in response to VikingOSX

Okay, just to get a better understanding my downloads of a word.doc are opening in Pages because that's my default opening application for word documents, and I also don't have the MS word app installed. Although I use the MS word.doc website and I have Google.docs installed, my documents I download from those two sources (MS word.doc and Google docs app) will still be open through Pages since Pages is the default opening application and since I don't have the MS word installed to change that default setting?! Thank you.

Nov 30, 2023 08:52 AM in response to jonaya144

jonaya144 wrote:

I was wondering if anyone knew why my word documents stopped downloading as word documents but now they automatically transfer over to pages and download to my files as pages. When I was searching up why it did this everyone told me to highlight a doc in my files, click the file tab on the top left, then hit "get info", and when the pages app drop down appears click the "open with" option and select MS word/ word documents. But when I tried doing that I have no word doc option It only has the option pages as a default option and the text edit app as an option. Is this because I don't have MS word app on my computer, just google docs. I didn't know if it was another mess up in my settings or because of an apple update, but if anyone could help me save a word doc as an word doc without transfer as a page in my files I would appreciate it.

If you don't have Word installed on your computer, you will have no option to open a document with Word. In order to open a document with Word, you have to have Word.

Nov 30, 2023 08:00 AM in response to jonaya144

A download of a Word .doc/.docx document does not automatically get converted to Pages. You would need to open that document in the Finder either by double-clicking or the secondary menu Open With : Pages. Since Pages must convert Word documents into Pages documents when it opens them, the original Word document remains unchanged. Without MS Word installed, Pages will be the default opening application for Word documents. Without Pages or MS Word installed, the default would be Apple's TextEdit.


If you had MS Word installed, and it was set to be the default opening application, then Pages would not enter the picture and the Word documents would automatically open in MS Word.

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Downloading a word.doc to my MacBook

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