Star Office is the old Corel office suite that originally developed from the WordPerfect folks years and years ago. They had a word process, spreadsheet, slideshow, database, and graphics apps all in a suite that competed directly with MS Office. It was bought and sold several times, and the Libre Office neem mentioned was derived in the public domain from Star Office and MS Office both. Star Office will provide the same functionality including editing that MS Office will do for a fraction of the price. And they have a trial you can use to try before you buy. Libre Office is a free cut-down version of Star Office as I said, but it won't do many things that MS Office will do, such as OLE, OOB, and other object-oriented cross-app automatic linking functions. Star Office won't do all of those either, but you may not have embedded objects in your Word documents so it's not applicable. I've used all of these products, and have run them on many different platforms including Mac, Unix, and Linux.
The Word & Excel viewer apps that zirkoni mentions are excellent for viewing/printing as he said. If you are just trying to see the documents and get hard copy from your archives, they are great. Can't make edits or mods as we said.
Only you know what the sources of those Word docs are, if you made them or received them from someone else, or they belonged to a company you worked for or contracted for. Armed with the above information you can use whatever you want. If you had like 200 Word doc files that used to be on your old computer or your old work computer and you just want to view/print them (no changes), use the free MS viewers. If you need to change or update them, you'll need to look at using Libre Office or Star/MS Office to get there. And Star/MS is going to cost you money. If you have complex docs with object embedding & linking (OLE), you are most likely going to need to cough up money if you want those documents to open up and work properly.
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