[Macworld]

Post your comments for Bugs & Fixes: Opening (very) old AppleWorks and Word documents here

[weid1]

Did you try an Appleworks Database? If you still have a working Appleworks somewhere, the data can be exported. I believe several formats were available, and in my case, I selected tab-delimited in imported into Excel with the intent of someday porting the data into the Open Office database module.

If you don't have a working Appleworks program available then what? Bente maybe?

[lookatthisguy]

 weid1, on 13 April 2012 - 12:31 PM, said:

Did you try an Appleworks Database? If you still have a working Appleworks somewhere, the data can be exported. I believe several formats were available, and in my case, I selected tab-delimited in imported into Excel with the intent of someday porting the data into the Open Office database module.

If you don't have a working Appleworks program available then what? Bente maybe?

To that end, I wonder if downloading the demo of FileMaker Pro would do the trick, if Bento won't? Might seem a bit excessive to recover the data, but then I guess that depends on how important it is to the user…

[thubsch]

Mr. Landau, please publish the second half of this article, "Opening (very) old AppleWorks database documents."

Thanks, Tristan

[BobOH]

I found that all documents had to be in the last version of Appleworks ( I think it was version 6) in order for iWork to convert the documents. I saved all older Appleworks documents to version 6 before I tried to convert the documents to iWork. All seemed to work.

[BobForsberg]

Unfortunately, I have over 30 years of AppleWorks/ClarisWorks/AppleWorks business Draw (DR) documents which became "dormant" in Lion. I offer this comment to save heartache and time for others unable to find a work-around for this dilemma. I use an older 24" white Intel iMac running 10.5.8 that works flawlessly in the AppleWorks environment. Several in the $400-$600 range are on eBay.

[MrYmath]

Any solution to opening up a 1983 Wordstar document?

[dshan]

I had the need to access a more than ten-year-old Excel for Windows spreadsheet recently that Numbers refused to open (not sure but it was probably created in Excel 95). I don't have any MS apps on my Mac (things usually work much more smoothly that way).

Google Docs also choked on it, then I remembered my rarely-used copy of Libre Office for Mac. Libre opened it with no problems and allowed me to save it in several other safer formats, including printing it to PDF and as a CSV file, for future reference.

[PhilipBrandes]

Unfortunately, with respect to old MS Word files, your method does not help with the scrambled misery of a file structure that resulted if the file was saved with the "Fast save" option enabled. Unfortunately, too many users were unaware of the pitfalls of this "feature" which Microsoft "helpfully" had turned on by default. Don't bother trying the Batch Docx Converter utility, it doesn't work either. I have been able to recover these types of files by first opening in Word 2004 and then saving in Word 2008/11 (.docx) format (you may have to append a .doc extension if the file was created with an old Word version that didn't use file extensions like Word 5.1). Of course, anyone who's running Lion cannot run Word 2004, so they are out of luck.

And of course, even if you are able to recover the content from an older Word file, saving it in a 2011-readable format loses the creation date info (which was actually rather useful in searching through historical files). Microsoft's failure to support its own legacy Word formats shows complete contempt for customers who have been using its software the longest. Apple isn't much better in this regard, they may have the excuse that AppleWorks is obsolete, but they could implement file conversion in Pages if they had any interest in doing so. If anyone has a genuinely workable solution it would be very helpful.

[LarryEdison]

I find that opening older files and/or Windows Word processing files is not only accomplished by the methods mentioned above - but also by using one other application: Neo-office. So far, when it comes to opening Word Perfect files (yes, I am an old Word Perfect user), Neo-Office has never failed me.

[rekkus]

What about the first assumption you made - getting documents from a SCSI hard drive onto some/any form of current storage, in order to access your old files. I have both a Mac IIsi with a 20 MB internal drive, as well as an external Lacie (I think...) 40MB drive, and I'd love to pull off old Word or Appleworks docs from both....

[GrantWiggins7ase]

Sometimes I open old WORD files (1990s) in Text Edit. I have even had luck 'placing' old WORD files in InDesign, then copy and pasting them into a WORD document.

[davidzizza]

File Juicer from EchoOne may also prove to be a good solution for recovering content from files whose format is no longer supported by current applications.

[talgellawg]

Now, if I only could find a way to open MacDraw II documents. I have a lot of these from the 80s.