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How to move MS Word documents to Pages.

I've been a Mac user since day one, but I have always used Microsoft Excel and Word. When I bought my latest iMac a couple of months ago I downloaded iOS Catalina. Apparently my old MS office apps are not compatible with Catalina. So I downloaded the new MS Office but haven't subscribed yet. I'd rather just start using Pages and Numbers. All of my old saved Word documents can be opened in new MS Office apps, but they are in "compatibility mode" and I cannot modify them or download them into Pages. Is there any way to download my old docs into Pages and Numbers so that I can work on them? I really don't want to use MS office any more.

iMac Line (2012 and Later)

Posted on Feb 15, 2020 10:30 PM

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Posted on Mar 19, 2020 1:36 PM

I have some Word .doc documents here that were created in the mid-90's and Pages want's nothing to do with them — too old. I opened them in LibreOffice (Writer), and resaved as Word .docx, and afterward, Pages had no issue with opening them. I think it is a good idea to have LibreOffice installed, if for no other reason than its tool worthiness. It is free, 64-bit, and will open almost anything. At the time of this post, LibreOffice v6.4.2 is current, and compatible with Catalina.


LibreOffice will install everything into one application file in your Applications folder. It is an MS Office clone and superset.

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Mar 19, 2020 1:36 PM in response to just like me

I have some Word .doc documents here that were created in the mid-90's and Pages want's nothing to do with them — too old. I opened them in LibreOffice (Writer), and resaved as Word .docx, and afterward, Pages had no issue with opening them. I think it is a good idea to have LibreOffice installed, if for no other reason than its tool worthiness. It is free, 64-bit, and will open almost anything. At the time of this post, LibreOffice v6.4.2 is current, and compatible with Catalina.


LibreOffice will install everything into one application file in your Applications folder. It is an MS Office clone and superset.

Feb 16, 2020 4:17 AM in response to vurtegobruce

You can open the Word and Excel doucments in Pages v8.2.1, or Numbers v6.2.1, however…


Pages and Numbers applications are not clones of Word and Excel, and there are features that you may have used in those Microsoft documents that Pages and Numbers cannot process, nor do Apple's applications represent feature parity with Word or Excel. This is because you are not opening these documents in their native document format, but rather asking Pages and Numbers to translate them into the respective Apple document formats without altering the original documents.


Apple does not guarantee that translation process will be accurate, and where Apple's applications do not support functionality in those Microsoft documents, it will be excluded, missing fonts substituted, and worst case, refuse to open the documents altogether.


You may or may not be happy with the translation result. If you are sharing those Word and Excel documents with others still using MS Office, there is no guarantee that the exported Pages or Numbers content will be translated properly again. Do not store your Pages and Numbers documents on Microsoft's One Drive, or Google Drive.

Mar 21, 2020 6:23 AM in response to VikingOSX

It seems that pages will open rtfd docs if the doc is suitable (whatever that means). I can't generalize. I have a 70 page pages doc with many equations. I exported it to rtfd format. Pages would not read this doc - it tries but bogs down. Maybe if I waited 5 minutes (or more) it would complete.


In any event, I shortened the rtfd doc to about 10 pages and removed the TOC from rtfd doc and pages read it, equations and all. I'm just saying what I did, but this obviously is not general. One thing: all paragraph headings became body* fields - ie, body with larger font and bold in my case but not headings.


Presumably Word can export to rtfd, so you could try this path. Perhaps you could post your result.

Mar 21, 2020 7:35 AM in response to keystrike1

This doesn't really belong in this particular thread as the original poster was asking for help in moving Word and Excel files to Pages — not dealing with RTFD files. You should have started a new post and topic for this content.


RTFD is an Apple anachronism. It is just a folder containing any images, equations as PDF, and the text contents in TXT.rtf — with a special bundle bit that tricks Finder into believing the folder is a file. I know LibreOffice Writer won't support it, and likely not Word either, though I have no version of Word available here to confirm that premise.


Pages probably does not expect a TOC in an RTFD document, and as I am just a fellow user, cannot clarify what is going on inside the Pages code that processes RTFD files.

Mar 21, 2020 12:08 PM in response to just like me

From the standpoint of moving old Word documents to Pages, you won't need to know anything about the RTF/RTFD acronyms. As I have posted beforehand, if those Word documents are too old for Pages to open, you can open them in LibreOffice Writer, and resave them as Word 2007 - now, which in updated .docx format documents, Pages should just open them.


Microsoft implemented RTF (rich text format) with the release of Word 3.0 in 1987. They revised the format through 2008, when it was last updated. NeXT created the RTFD (rich text format directory) format for TextEdit as implemented in the NeXTSTEP operating system, and is still used today in either RTF or RTFD formats in TextEdit on macOS.

How to move MS Word documents to Pages.

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