opening old appleworks files

Hi GH,

Pages 08 can open AppleWorks 6 word processing documents, but none earlier than version 6. The other iWork 08 applications, Numbers and Keynote can open AW 6 spreadsheets and presentations respectively.

AppleWorks 6.2.9 can open AW 6 documents, and should be able to open AW 5, CW 5 and earlier ClarisWorks versions as well, but is know to fail with some documents before AW 6. (There seems to be no reliable way of predicting which will fail.)

AppleWorks 6 was introduced in 2000, so documents produced in 2002 cold be AW 6 versions. OTOH, AppleWorks 5 had many fans who did not move to AW 6 until forced to by changing to OS X, so it's also possible that these are AW 5 documents.

You should be able to find out by setting your AW 6 preferences to show the 'previous version warning' before attempting to open such a file.

AppleWorks 6.2.4 has a better track record for opening AW files before version 6. You may be able to find a copy of 6.2.4 that you can use for this purpose, then resave the files to transfer to your own machine and your copy of AW 6.

As a last resort, you can usually recover the text from an AW word processing file by opening it into a Text editor such as Text Edit (included with your iMac) or Text Wrangler (available for free download and use) from BareBones Software. Files recovered in this manner will show the usually hidden file header and footer meta data included in the file, will have lost all formatting, and will not include inserted frames or objects.

Regards,
Barry

Hi GH,

I was in a rush finishing that post, andd neglected to ask...

What happens when you try to open one of these older files?
What do you do to open the file? What response do you get (actions and messages) from the Mac?

Regards,
Barry

Hmmm...

Not a message I've seen before. With luck, someone else will have, and will join in.

Regards,
Barry

That message in Pages means the file is not an AppleWorks 6 file, probably AppleWorks 5.

Hello

Save this script as an application on the desktop.
Drag and drop a file's icon onto the script's one.
You will get a dialog telling you if:
it's not an AppleWorks doc.
it's not an AW6's doc.
it's an AW6 doc.
So you will easily understand what you get with Pages.

--[SCRIPT]
on open (theSel)

set lefichier to item 1 of theSel
set theKey to (read (lefichier as alias) from 1 for 8)

if theKey ends with "BOBO" then
set theKey to ASCII number of first character of theKey
if theKey is 6 then
display dialog "" & lefichier & return & "is an AW6 document"
else

display dialog "" & lefichier & return & "is NOT an AW6 document"
end if
else
display dialog "" & lefichier & return & "is NOT an AW document"
end if
end open
--[/SCRIPT]

Yvan KOENIG (from FRANCE dimanche 11 novembre 2007 09:52:39)

I have lots of old AppleWorks files that display the 'I/O error' message when I try to open them in AW 6.2.9. I haven't found an easy way of opening old AW drawing documents (though MS Word — if set to open all files — will extract any text that may be part of a drawing), but MacLink Plus Deluxe translates old AW word-processing documents (all the way back to AW 2, I think), keeping the formatting and fonts.

Hello

You met a feature described many times.

AppleWorks 629 sometimes fails to open old AW documents which may be open with AppleWorks 628 (under Classic) or with AppleWorks 624 or AppleWorks 627.

My guess is that this odd behaviour was introduced by the patch killing the old infamous Autosave on strike bug.

Yvan KOENIG (from FRANCE dimanche 3 février 2008 11:50:30)

I have a large number of files created in AppleWorks, and have AppleWorks 6.2.9 installed.

I can open most of these in Pages '08 but not drawing documents. As I plan to migrate completely to the iWorks Suite how do I convert these documents in an editable form?

The only program I know of, other than AppleWorks, that can open AppleWorks draw documents is EasyDraw. I think it's rather expensive, though.

For myself, I am slowly converting my old AppleWorks 6 newsletters done in draw to word processing by copy/paste as floating objects & then opening them in Pages. I was surprised to find that Pages page layout mode can't open AppleWorks draw documents, so I have left feedback for the Pages team requesting the feature.

Thank you to Peggy for this information. It is not what I wanted to hear, but at least I now have an answer. Back to the redrawing!