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ANY WAY TO OPEN AN OLD .CWK FILE

I CAN' OPEN OLD CLARIS WORKS FILES

MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 10.14

Posted on Jan 28, 2024 11:48 AM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Jan 28, 2024 12:17 PM

Your best bet is an older Mac running OS X Snow Leopard (10.6.8) with AppleWorks 6.2.9 installed. Then you can export the .CWK to Word, or (I believe) PDF.


LibreOffice can open ClarisWorks and AppleWorks documents (versions 5 & 6) from either Windows or Mac. Your best results will be .CWK documents that were a single entity document containing just a word processing document, or a spreadsheet. Pages '09 v4.3 and Numbers '09 v2.3 could open these single-function .CWK documents. So can older LibreOffice versions.


However, AppleWorks allowed one to mix Word Processing, Spreadsheet, graphics and database content in a single document and those complex .CWK documents will give any application fits and even LibreOffice may not open them or at least open them appearing as they did in AppleWorks. AppleWorks database content will open as a spreadsheet.


Your profile shows you on macOS Mojave, and the currently available (7.6.4) LibreOffice requires macOS Catalina or later. You would want LibreOffice 4.4.7.2 which was the last version compatible with macOS Mojave (10.14.6).

2 replies
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Jan 28, 2024 12:17 PM in response to Irish315

Your best bet is an older Mac running OS X Snow Leopard (10.6.8) with AppleWorks 6.2.9 installed. Then you can export the .CWK to Word, or (I believe) PDF.


LibreOffice can open ClarisWorks and AppleWorks documents (versions 5 & 6) from either Windows or Mac. Your best results will be .CWK documents that were a single entity document containing just a word processing document, or a spreadsheet. Pages '09 v4.3 and Numbers '09 v2.3 could open these single-function .CWK documents. So can older LibreOffice versions.


However, AppleWorks allowed one to mix Word Processing, Spreadsheet, graphics and database content in a single document and those complex .CWK documents will give any application fits and even LibreOffice may not open them or at least open them appearing as they did in AppleWorks. AppleWorks database content will open as a spreadsheet.


Your profile shows you on macOS Mojave, and the currently available (7.6.4) LibreOffice requires macOS Catalina or later. You would want LibreOffice 4.4.7.2 which was the last version compatible with macOS Mojave (10.14.6).

ANY WAY TO OPEN AN OLD .CWK FILE

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