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Thank you for your answers MarkRae and Albags, I have Microsoft office 2000 which will work with XP at home but only some parts work with Vista on my laptop (Office 2000 Word worked fine for a few months and then mysteriously stopped) so I have Open Office for their version of Word.
My friend has now given me the information I needed from the Publisher files in hard copies so it's not that vital that I can open the files but I'm still curious whether I could have got round the problem with freeware!