".PRN files are ones created when you use File=>Print and
Print to File.  It contains instruction sets and data
formatted for a particular printer language.  If it's an
HP printer, for example, you'd need to locate a PCL converter
or viewer to have the content available again, or print
the file then use your scanner and an OCR application
to convert the text back to a document."

"
A .prn file will contain codes for whatever specific printer it was
generated for, so any conversion would be very difficult. If it was a
prn generated for the "generic" text printer in Windows, then it's
just a TXT file, and you can change the file suffix from prn to txt,
and Word will treat it as such.

If all you have is the prn file (and it's not a plain txt file),
you're SOL unless you can find the model printer it is specific to,
and print it out."
Taken from two different google posts.

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Why bother?
.prn is a printer text file.  
It's only real purpose is to shuttle your text to the printer for rendering.
You can open .prn files in many text editors, but you're going to see a tremendous amount of gobbledy-gook surrounding your info of interest, this being printer code for formatting, etc.  I.E. You'd have to hack this stuff away to make the file useful.

"'Tis an ill wind that blows no minds." - Malaclypse the Younger

fidleid,

Although not a quick solution due to having to download and install two or more free programs, you and/or others may want to consider the following.

One way to convert .prn to Word...
Rename the .prn to .ps
Use GSview 4.0* (free download) to convert to .pdf
[I have better results with GSview than with Adobe Distiller.]
Open the .pdf in Adobe Acrobat**
Edit-Copy to Clipboard
Open Word
Paste (the formatting will be retained)

*GSview requires Ghostscript (free). You must download Ghostscript separately. Install Ghostscript first then GSview.

**If you don't have Adobe Acrobat, there is a shareware program, pdf2word, which is free to try; $39.95 to buy. There is also a free online ps2pdf converter at www.ps2pdf.com

Note to any OmniPage Pro users: Did you know you can use OmniPage pro to open .pdf documents and output in Word format?

Sorry, forgot to include the url for GSview...

     http://www.ghostscript.com/