I cannot change the display width when I view a Word file, and can only read the file by horizontally scrolling through each line. Does Multiview solve this problem - and why is it that every other file manager in the world seems to effortlessly allow you to control your Word display except for Opus? For all the hype, Opus seems to have trouble doing the things that a user would most appreciate. Thanks for any suggestions or comments.
Opus views Word files fine for most people. Which plugin are you using, MultiView or ActiveX? If it's ActiveX, do you have the new version that's in the Plugins forum? It is much improved over the old version (and will be in the next Opus release, but isn't in the current one). Also, which version of Word do you have installed, if any, and do you have the same problems viewing Word documents in Internet Explorer? Are you using Vista or XP?
I should add, zooming in/out when viewing Word files via the ActiveX plugin is on my to-do list for the new plugin, but isn't in yet.
If you have Office 2007 you shouldn't need it as the Preview Handler seems to re-flow the text to fit the width of the window, but with older versions of Office I agree it can be annoying that you have to resize the viewer to see all the text.
I don't know if MultiView will work better in that regard but I suspect if you've used other file managers which can view Word documents then they are using the same stuff as MultiView, since there are very few libraries for displaying Word documents out there. (The ActiveX plugin displays the documents using Word itself, or the Word Preview Handler if Office 2007 is installed, which is essentially Word itself as well.)
I spent some time looking at this today. Good news: The next version of the ActiveX plugin will allow you to zoom and fit-to-page when viewing Word documents.
I'm not sure exactly when it will be released as it requires some features of the next version of Opus, but it's on the way.
By the way, ignoring Office 2007 (Preview Handlers), at the moment the ActiveX plugin will show Word documents at the zoom level they were saved at. If a document was saved in Page Width mode then it will be displayed in that mode as well. The new ActiveX plugin will tell Word to enter Page Width mode regardless of how the document was saved, if the viewer window is in fit-to-page mode.
The updated ActiveX plugin is now part of Opus 9.1.0.4 (just released). This lets you zoom Office documents and also set them to fit-to-page, which should address the points you raised.
The zoom doesn't work for me 
!
That's a very old post, and I think was talking about zoom being enabled when using the (now legacy) option to view files by embedding the Office applications themselves, rather than the more modern method of using the Office preview handlers (which come with newer versions of Office).
While the option to embed Office itself is still there, we don't recommend using it over using Office's preview handlers, as embedding Office is not always stable and will introduce problems if more than one viewer pane and/or Office itself has the same file open. (The Office apps do not like it when more than one copy of Office has the same file open. The Office preview handlers do not have that problem.)
The Office preview handlers are generally the way to go with modern versions of Office, but also have limited functionality as they were designed to be fast, simple viewers, and are not the full Office apps.
What the preview handlers do is largely outside of our control. We just tell them to display the file and which window to display it in. The only exception might be if you see they have different or additional functionality in the File Explorer viewer pane, in which case we could investigate how to enable the same in Opus; but as far as I know the preview handlers function the same in both Opus and File Explorer.