Q: I have held on to AppleWorks for as long as possible but Lion no longer supports it. Is there an app out there that converts AppleWorks to something Lion recognizes?

Do you still have the computer that runs Appleworks?  You could use Appleworks to convert to something else that might work in Lion.

http://www.macworld.com/article/160843/2011/06/last_appleworks.html

I am wondering if Pages might do the conversion since it is an Apple successor to Appleworks.

You can use Apple's iWorks suite of programs (Pages, Numbers, and Keynote) to do most of it in Lion.

Pages will open AppleWorks 6 word processing documents.

Numbers will open AW 6 spreadsheets.

Keynote will open AW 6 presentations.

You may already have those apps on your machine if you acquired it recently. If not, you can get them individually from the Mac Apple Store via download at about US$20 each; or on disk from the Apple Store for about US$80.

Note - with regard to word processing documents, Pages will open AW 6 versions, but not any earlier versions (such as AW 5 or ClarisWorks). So, be sure to update all you docs to AW 6 before transferring them to the Lion-booted machine.

Don Archibald offered a good solution, but note that it works with only AppleWorks 6.x files, if an older Claris/AW version the import will not work. If this is the case, the alternative is to export files in Claris/AW in a generic format, e.g. rtf for word processing and then import them in iWork components. Make a test.

If your AW files were created with AW 6, then the direct import in Pages, Numbers or Keynote is the most comfortable solution.

It's worth adding that nothing will open Appleworks databases. They can only be saved by exporting them as ASCII text and opening that in a database or spreadsheet application - of course the formatting will be lost, and calculation fields will bring over only the result, not the calculation. If you can't open a database in AppleWorks to export it then it's lost.

I do not know exactly what files are there but that is why my suggestion was to export in Claris/AW, then import into a newer app of his/her choice. I once had this experience, some time in 2002.

Peggy, read more threads in this forum there are more to be said. Roger has a website with information and Yvan Koenig has a script that can help to tell you which type of AW document you have.

fruhulda wrote:

 

Roger has a website with information

...which is at

http://rfwilmut.net/aw

To open any Appleworks Text file in Lion, open "Text Edit" and under "File" pull down the menu and select "Open…" then select your Appleworks file and click "Open".  Now copy the text and paste it into any document.

samerwin wrote:

 

To open any Appleworks Text file in Lion, open "Text Edit" and under "File" pull down the menu and select "Open…" then select your Appleworks file and click "Open".  Now copy the text and paste it into any document.

...whereupon you will get an awful lot of programming garbage, though you may be able to pick out the text of a Word Proocessing document - though why bother? - Pages will open Word Processing documents OK.

If you are running Lion, Pages will not open older Appleworks files without updating them to the latest version. If formatting is not important, Text Edit is simpler than returning to a pre-Lion system in order to open Appleworks files and update or convert them to something else. I only care about recovering the text without all the hassle.

For the overwhelming majority of people, this method may prove tiresome and unpractical, especially if they need to preserve a minimal formatting.

Otherwise, yes, TextEdit virtually opens any text format.