(Be aware, however, that some Word 5 documents will cause Word 2011 to crash or freeze, presumably because of the nature of some of their contents, so you have no guarantee here either.) If you make sure that the file name includes '.doc', you don't have to use any special options to open them. You are obliged to go through the Open File dialog box for each file.
Word 2011 is indeed able to open Word 5 documents, but not via double-click or drag-and-drop. For such files, my only option is to force-open them in TextEdit, which at least preserves the accents.
There is also an option called 'Recover text from any file' (which is apparently a file format in MS's parlance) but it fails to preserve accented characters, so even that option is useless. When I try to open them, Word throws a 'Convert File' dialog box asking me to choose a file format to convert from, but 'Word 3 document' and 'Word 4 document' are not listed as options and 'Rich Text Format' does not work. I have old Word 3/4 documents from 1988/1989 that Word 2011 (or Word 2008 for that matter) is simply unable to open, no matter which option I choose. I am afraid this 'hint' is simply incorrect.
