My boyfriend has an ancient Mac IIci, which runs System 7.1 and has Microsoft Office 5.1 on it.

I've been saving his Word 5.1 doc files onto floppy disks as "interchange format" (.rtf, rich-text format) files, bringing the floppies over to my HP Pavilion A6230N PC, which has Conversions Plus!, MacDrive 7 and OpenOffice on it. I have an NEC external floppy drive, which connects to the PC via USB cable.

After starting up MacDrive 7, I've been opening up each file with OpenOffice and saving them as Microsoft Word 97/2000/XP doc files into a folder on my desktop. As I finish getting through each floppy, I save them as rich-text format files into another folder on my desktop.

Say, for example, I buy a much more recent Mac, and I want to put the files I've been saving from PC onto the new Mac--I would burn a CD, but with which files--the Word doc files, or the rich-text format files?

I almost forgot to add that I thought of buying some sort of cable (which kind, I don't know) to somehow connect the old Mac and the newer Mac, and somehow dragging the Word 5.1 files from the old one directly to the new one.

Would the latest version of NeoOffice (OpenOffice for Macs) or Microsoft Office 2004 or 2008 be able to recognize and/or read these old doc files?

Thank you very much.

Sorry that this is so long. Thank you in advance for any and all advice and help.