Office '08 Can't Read Chinese Characters in Windows-Created Docs? One of my friends had recently purchased a MacBook Pro 13" and had been astounded to find that he couldn't read some of his old documents that were in Chinese in Office 2008.

All the characters had been reduced to little square blocks like [].
He needs to make sure that he has the correct fonts installed—Office is trying to display the document, but couldn't find the necessary characters.

It's possible that the previous owner of the MBP deleted fonts he didn't use, or that those particular documents used a font that didn't come with the OS.