Word for Mac seems to use a line ending character not recognized by perl. Unix/Linux and probably MacOS uses \n (LF, ascii 10) for line endings, Windows uses \r\n (CR/LF, ascii 13,10). Your Word for Mac seems to use something without any \n at all, maybe a relict from old MacOS9 ??

Anyway, if you really want to use Word for Mac and it doesn't have a switch to change its behaviour, you could change perls notion of what a line ending is by changing $/ before reading this file.

Just to be sure, you really did save as a text file and didn't only change the filename from bla.doc to bla.txt ?