How to View a Word Document on Your iPod
Although iPods are primarily designed to be a portable music/video player for the customers, their range of utility is being expanded and explored with each passing day. Already many of us are quite comfortable with the idea of using our iPods as portable memory storage devices so that we can transfer data from one platform to another – much like a flash drive. However, there are a fraction of users who use iPod (Nanos especially) and would like to read Word documents on their iPods.
Technically speaking, an iPod is not designed to display Word documents. However, there is a cute workaround to this problem. What you can do is simply convert your Word document into a simple Text document and voila – your iPod will display the document without any hiccups.
To do this relatively easy – simply open your Word document on your PC, and go to “File -> Save As”. In the consequent dialog that pops up, click on the drop-down menu for the “Save As Type” field. A list of different file formats will pop up. This list will typically contain file formats such as Word Document, Web Page, Web Page (filtered), Rich Text Format, and so on. In this list, find the option that says “Plain Text”. Select this option and then slick on “Save”.
This time, your file (Word document) will saved as a simple Text document with the “.txt” file extension. (The default program to view such files in Window systems is Notepad.)
When you finally transfer this Text file to your iPod, you will find that you are able to read all of the text stored in it. However, one fallout of this method is that all of the formatting of the Word document is lost – including bold face text, italics, underlining, bulleting, special characters, images, tables, and so on.