Opening documents whose programs you don't have

I know Microsoft Publisher is extensively used, often by the office secretary or a club volunteer who is detailed off to produce a staff newsletter or somesuch. But I don't have a copy on either my work or home computer, partly because it no longer comes bundled with Office and partly because while it promises much it delivers very badly, and misbehaves something dreadful every time it goes visiting. My post here explains why. Unfortunately, from time to time documents created in Publisher land on my desk, and then what do I do? One answer is to use the free service Zamzar to convert the document to a format I can open. In fact, Zamzar can take an amazing number of document types - including spreadsheets, music, video, images and PowerPoint type presentations - and change them to formats you can handle. One really helpful one is WordPerfect, which once upon a time used to be king of the word processing world but has been almost completely supplanted by Word. Nonetheless, WordPerfect documents still hit my desk on occasion, and no other program I have will open them. Up to discovering Zamzar, I had to email the sender and ask him/her to resend in an open format such as RTF (Rich Text Format, which any word processor can read).