Locate the .doc file you want to open on the computer's hard drive, highlight it and click the "Open" button to open the document in the WordPad program.

How to Open WordPad in Windows 7. Included with every version of Windows 7 is WordPad, a lightweight program that gives you the basic functionality of a word processor.

Microsoft announced today that it will deprecate WordPad with a future Windows update as it's no longer under active development, though the company did not specify the precise timing of this change.