Macwrite II

Question

montoyacat Author

Level 1

8 points

Macwrite II

Help!

How do I open old MacWrite II documents on a iMac?

iMac, Mac OS X (10.4.11)

Posted on Feb 11, 2008 2:45 PM

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Answer 1

Jan Hedlund

Level 7

24,235 points

Feb 11, 2008 3:40 PM in response to montoyacat

Unless a program which can open (see the Open dialogue) the files in question is available, a conversion utility (such as MacLinkPlus) will be needed. This list of file formats contains MacWrite II.

Alternatively, if you would have had access to the original program and an older Mac, you could have (re)saved (Save As) the files in a format understandable by the newer application(s).

Jan

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Answer 2

Feb 11, 2008 3:37 PM in response to montoyacat

Do you already have them transferred to the iMac?

Which iMac?

Do you have AppleWorks?

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Answer 3

Limnos

Level 10

428,423 points

Feb 11, 2008 8:09 PM in response to montoyacat

Some programs store their files mostly as text with formatting codes. I am not sure about the Macwrite format. If it does this you might be able to get at least the text part by opening the files with a text editor. It has been a while since I needed to do this but I think BBedit will open just about anything. Whether or not you can make sense of it is another matter.

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Answer 4

montoyacat Author

Level 1

8 points

Feb 12, 2008 4:09 PM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

Unfortunately, the files are already on my new iMac (2.16 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo.) They are a collection of journals and papers from college and it never occurred to me that I might not be able to open them on my new computer. After reading some of the replies to my question I tried opening the files with TextEdit. I was able to open them and read them, but there is a lot of "garbage" text attached to them. I don't have AppleWorks, but I'm wondering if I should buy Word or some other word processing program and just cut and paste the content from my old files...

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Answer 5

Feb 21, 2008 8:06 PM in response to montoyacat

Hi! If your Mac runs Classic then you should be able to download the old Word Perfect app HERE. With Word Perfect you can open the MacWrite II doc. Then save it as an rtf doc and then open it using Neo Office. Tom

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Answer 6

Feb 21, 2008 9:27 PM in response to Thomas Bryant

NeoOffice is a Mac offshoot of Open Office -- an Open Source work-alike to Microsoft Office, that was developed without stealing any of the code from Microsoft office. It can't open your MacWrite Files directly, but it can certainly do .rtf files once you get them converted.

http://www.neooffice.org

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