AppleWorks Question

[Bob White]

Re: AppleWorks Question

.......all the way back to the year 2001. When I try to open an AppleWorks document from the year 2000, it says something about an "unsupported version of AppleWorks." ........... Pages is a pretty good app, imho.)

Which explains my experience. The guy that I helped recently had a Performa 550 (sold 1993-1996) and he is the type of person who never updates anything on their computer. Thus, the files I was trying to help him with must have been Appleworks 4.3 or 5.0. Live and learn! Thank you, Frank.

BTW: I also preach the virtues of Pages. Also, Keynote which I call the Swiss knife of graphics presentation and superior to any other presentation software out there.

[Frank Zwolinski]

Re: AppleWorks Question

Just one more question. In answer to Frank, I BELIEVE that many of these documents were saved earlier than 2000 and therefore an early version of AW. I have found that some save with LibreOffice, and others do not. So, does anyone know of a program thta opens these earlier files. I did find a local guy with AppleWorks who is willing to convert for me but given the large amount of files I am finding and not willing to impose, I would like to have some thing I can use from my own computer. My OS X is v.10.8.4.

Thanks for all these opinions and I will purchase iWork as well.

Thanks,
Frank

[Janice Roden]

Re: AppleWorks Question

Just one more question. In answer to Frank, I BELIEVE that many of these documents were saved earlier than 2000 and therefore an early version of AW. I have found that some save with LibreOffice, and others do not. So, does anyone know of a program thta opens these earlier files. I did find a local guy with AppleWorks who is willing to convert for me but given the large amount of files I am finding and not willing to impose, I would like to have some thing I can use from my own computer. My OS X is v.10.8.4.

Thanks for all these opinions and I will purchase iWork as well.

Thanks,
Frank

You probably have lost that file. I had many appleworks files, Iworks will open some, but NOT ALL. Good luck.

[Bob White]

Re: AppleWorks Question

Found another article... Ted Landau wrote this one and says that he was able to open the really old word processing files with TextWrangler with lots of gobbledegook before and after the intact text. (http://www.macworld.com/article/1166...week_h_cbintro)

[ttl]

Re: AppleWorks Question

And of course there's always Text Edit, already on everyone's Mac. Most of the gobbledegook is after the intact text.

[John M. Leggett]

Re: AppleWorks Question

Pages will not open AppleWorks files. Age has nothing to do with it. Storage format has everything to do with it. Pages does not "know" the AppleWorks storage scheme.

Having said that, I feel that Apple made a large mistake by not including the ability to do so.

I agree--especially since Appleworks was such a widely used program. I decided that I would retain the ability to access my manyAW files by keeping my old G3. It's not worth much anyway, but has been a real lifesaver in many ways.

Perhaps the best solution for anyone with a lot of old AW files is to look around for an older Mac with AW still on it and buy it. I bought a B&W G3 with Panther and AW on it a couple of years ago for $50. If I hadn't already given it away, I'd be happy to give it to the poster here who needs it.

[colinc]

Re: AppleWorks Question

I still have every version from the ClarisWorks beta onwards!

I keep them all, mostly on a pre-Intel Mac in the bottom of a cupboard, for the odd legacy file that turns up from time to time.

My memory is that AW5 will open anything that is just wp and once re-saved AW6 will open it.

The problem is with that useful feature that allowed spreadsheets or databases to be incorporated. I think for those you have to go back to a PPC Mac and use v3 or 4 and once re-saved then use 5 to get to 6. A pain, and only worth it if the data or the format it is in is important.

Actually I still miss the AW interface, in so many ways preferable to Pages even after all these years and of course Macs are still ill-served when it comes to a 'works' app with a built-in db.

Cheers,

Colin

[Laurent A]

Re: AppleWorks Question

Hello Frank,

Just one more question. In answer to Frank, I BELIEVE that many of these documents were saved earlier than 2000 and therefore an early version of AW. I have found that some save with LibreOffice, and others do not. ...

Normally, if I had not made mistakes, LibreOffice can open all ClarisWorks and AppleWorks
word-processing documents (*), but it is not able to open spreadsheet, presentation, database files.
IWork allows to retrieve AppleWorks v6 files : Pages the word-processing documents,
Number the spreadsheet files and KeyNote the presentation files.

Notes:
- if you have some files which are not confidential ..., I may be interested to see one or two to
check if I have done some mistakes when I write the filter which does the conversion for LibreOffice
( see http://sourceforge.net/p/libmwaw/wiki/Home/ ), you can find my email address in

http://www.loria.fr/~alonso

[George Chapman]

Re: AppleWorks Question

I have seen in theNov 2013 MacLife magazine that "icWord" and "icXL" from www.panergy-software.com will convert ClarisWorks files to several different formats. It's worth a try.