Q: Accessing a Phonebook.cwk document without AW
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Nov 23, 2011 6:28 PMby Peggy,There is nothing other than AppleWorks that can open AppleWorks databases. You'll need to find someone with a Mac & AppleWorks that can save/export the database as text. The text file would be tab-delimited text that can be imported into to Address Book as well as Pages or Numbers. Try a local Mac user group or elementary school.
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Dec 31, 2011 10:41 PMby Leslie Bisno,Hi, Peggy and Barry -
I finally have had a chance to try your instructions. I saved the AW phonebook as described above, added the .txt suffix, and then I opened it with TextEdit and with Pages - both produced the info, but in a very awkward format. I tried importing into Address Book, but got only a series of cards that said No Name and had no info. I emailed the ASCII file to myself and tried the same things on my new Mac, running OS 10.7.2, and got the same results. Is there a way to improve my results?
Thanks so much for your help.
- Leslie
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Jan 1, 2012 4:06 AMby Roger Wilmut1,You can't import it into Address Book. You can import it into Numbers, where the data will appear in a rather unattractive tabular form but will at least be available: or you could get Bento ($49, free trial available) which is a simple database program, and import it into that. The import process into Bento is described here.
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Jan 1, 2012 9:24 AMby Peggy,You can import a tab-delimited text file with the .txt extension into Address Book. You can also import .csv files. First I tested it with a file I had saved years ago from AppleWorks. Then, because I didn't want my data to show in the screenshots, I created a simple two line file in Pages & exported it as plain text.
Open Address Book & go to File > Import & select your .txt file then click Import. You might have to rearrange the data though if it doesn't match the Address Book fields.
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Jan 2, 2012 2:07 PMby Leslie Bisno,Hi, Peggy -
You said above: Open Address Book & go to File > Import & select your .txt file then click Import. You might have to rearrange the data though if it doesn't match the Address Book fields.
I tried that and got only a series of address cards that said "No name" or some such, with no data.
You also said: You can also import .csv files. First I tested it with a file I had saved years ago from AppleWorks. Then, because I didn't want my data to show in the screenshots, I created a simple two line file in Pages & exported it as plain text.
I'm afraid that's a bit Greek to me.
What do you think of Roger's solution?
Thanks for you help!
- Leslie
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Jan 2, 2012 2:15 PMby Roger Wilmut1,Leslie Bisno wrote:
do you know whether the resulting data in tabular format be easier to dicypher than it is in Pages or TextEdit?
Youi could get the information to display in Pages or TextEdit in Rich Text mode: you need to select all and adjust the tabs to get readable columns - you probably want to be in landscape mode. However if you have more than a handful of fields, or if any of them is long, it will get unmanageable very quickly, so a spreadsheet would be better.
Open Office has a spreadsheeet and is free, so you could try it in that. It also has a database section but frankly it's a shambles and I would suggest avoiding it: Bento wouldbe easier to handle.
