Q: Appleworks Equivalent

Hi PeggyO,

"I was able to convert all AW documents to Pages by  selecting one, getting info and clicking the OPEN WITH and CHANGE ALL buttons to Pages."

This in itself does not convert the file to a Pages file. The only thing it changes is the default application that the Mac OS will call on to attempt to open the file.

If the file is an AppleWorks Word Processing document, last saved from AppleWorks 6.x.x, Pages will be able to open it, and will convert it to a Pages document at that time. The accuracy of the conversion will depend on what features of AppleWorks were used in creating it, so if there are any that you need to be accurate copies of the original, I would suggest opening them in Pages while you still have AppleWorks available. You may need to do some copy and paste to transfer some elements.

If the file is any other type of AppleWorks file, or if it is any type of AppleWorks or ClarisWorks file saved from a previous version, Pages will be called on to open it, but will fail, probably presenting a message that it mas made by an unsupported version of AppleWorks, or that it is not a word processing file.

Your method of transferring the data from a database file to a Numbers file is a good one. It will transfer the data, but not the formulas or the formatting. For formulas, you'll get the last calculated result. Checkbox transfers will show their current state, "on" or "off", Pop-up menus and radio buttons will show either the text or a number corresponding to the position of the choice in the list.

I'm not certain why you've pasted the data into an MS Excel document, then opened that document into Numbers. You should be able to paste directly into a Numbers table.

Regards,

Barry

Thanks for the very helpful explanations Barry. I don't remember why I thought I had to go from AW to Excel. You are right, of course, that it's not necessary. I did lose the initial zero in zip codes for addresses I had in a database. Any way to make a universal fix?

Because I have hundreds of AW documents now openable by Pages but not converted, I am thinking of keeping them in my MacBook with Snow Leopard and use Lion only on my iMac.

But here's another question. If I have OS5 on my iPad and iPhone but Snow Leopard on my iMac. When MobileMe vanishes, can I manually sync?

Thanks for any further advice.

Peg

"I did lose the initial zero in zip codes for addresses I had in a database. Any way to make a universal fix?"

It's fairly easy to tack them back on. Your ZIP codes come in two flavours—the original five digit version, and the more recent ZIP+4, five digits,a hyphen,then four digits.

So you want to end up with a string that is either 5 digits long or 10 characters long. In the sort test I did, the ZIP+4 numbers were all treated as text strings, and the leading zero(es) survived, even when I 'neglected' to include the hyphen, and instead inserted a space after the fifth digit. On the assumption that this would not always be true, I decided the formula should include appending any dropped zeroes to these as well.:

Column B contains the codes, as transferred. Column C, inserted after column B, contains the corrected versions.

Formula:

C2 and filled down: =IF(LEN(B)>5,RIGHT("00000"&B,10),RIGHT("00000"&B,5))

The formula checks the number of characters displayed in the cell in column B. If the length is more than five, the first RIGHT statement appends the contents of column B, as Text, to a text string containing five zeroes, then returns the rightmost 10 characters of that string. If the length is not more than five characters, the second RIGHT statement does the same thing, but returns the rightmost 5 characters of the string..

I've formatted column B cells as Text, but this seems unnecessary; results are unchanged from those obtained with column B's format left at 'Automatic'.

After the calculation:

• Select C2 to the end of column C, Copy.
• Select B2 to the end of column B, go Edit > Paste Values.
• Delete column C.

Regards,

Barry

PS: Syncing would be done through iCloud, currently using either iTumes or a browser, as the Mac OS X iWork applications haven't yet been updated to iCloud awareness.

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