Handling the British National Corpus 

A corpus like the BNC may be usefully converted in these ways:

1.In a format which Windows will expect, preferably with a .txt filename so that Windows will open each text easily

2.with the files all stored in folders whose names mean something useful

3.in Unicode, a format which handles all the curly quote marks and dashes unambiguously

4.optionally you may also want a markup-free copy so you can read the texts easily.

In WordSmith, use Text Converter for this. Follow the link for full step-by-step details.