Converting word docs to pages automatically

Highlight a known Word document in the Finder, highlight it & choose Get Info from the File menu. In the Get Info box, click the triangle next to "Open With." Click on this drop-down menu & choose Pages. If Pages is not a choice, choose "Other" & navigate to the Pages application. Now click the "Change" button under the text that asks if you want to open all documents like this with Pages. You can then double-click the Word documents & they will open in Pages. Note that the icon for the Word files will have a plain, white icon. Repeat with a PowerPoint document & change to Keynote.

In addition to what Peggy wrote, and if she allows this:

This modifies the app to be open with, is not their conversion, which must be done within Pages itself, and Keynote respectively. These files cannot be converted directly, I do not know such a converter, as in the beautiful days of classic Mac OS.

Could you explain what you mean, Cattus?

When Pages open the Word doc in Pages it is converted to Pages format!

I think my English is again bad: of course, but the initial question was ‘How do I configure my computer to automatically convert these to pages and keynote so they open in those programs (if this is possible)?’, s

o our colleague asked a method to CONVERT the files directly, before opening in Pages, so I warned him/her that conversion is not possible otherwise than WITHIN Pages / Numbers, i.e. after opening the files and importing them using the internal pasring engine of the application.

Therefore, what he/she wants is, in fact, a 3-step action:

- Using Info, instruct the system to open .doc and xls files with Pages and Numbers respectively

- Opening them with those apps

- Resaving them with the new format, as Pages and Numbers cannot handle the original format as the OpenOffice, LibreOffice and NeoOffice can do.

I think, therefore, I gave him/her the correct details in order to deal with such files in iWork.

Thank you, Cattus!

Pages is indeed a beautiful app, needs just a little bit of refinement to become a truly great app. But, if you like as is, use it. Note that, if need be to send files to PC users, you must always export iWork files to something readable in Windows or Linux. iWork is exlucisvely a Mac OS X suite, with Pages also having an iOS version.

You may thus add 5, or even 10, points to my account, megan 724 forgot to do that! Or maybe Yvan can do that on megan’s behalf? 😊

Megan, I was kidding, I do not hunt points and was a kind of witty remark at fruhulda’s irony. 😁

P.S. It was not entirely clear (to me) that you knew all the details I wrote about, if yes, no harm to repeat them.

You're very welcome. Thanks for the points on my journey to Level 8.

This is for Peggy...you saved my sanity...I just bought Mountain Lion, which changed all my Word docs to inoperable..this included all my passwords..ugh..so I bought Pages, but couldnt' figure how to convert my "04 Word docs...long story short..I did what you said and they converted..I just have to trash all the original docs after they change..Thanks you, Judy

Hope it's ok to resurrect this discussion. I followed Peggy's helpful advice. The translation from Word to Pages worked - but I lost some of the text you'd normally see in the "Track Changes" version of Word, that is, the marginal annotations of what my editor deleted from a previous version of the script. Now that we've mastered the Word to Pages translation, I'm greedily wondering if there's a way to preserve ALL the text in a "Track Changes" Word document.

You could have started a new post with your current question of how to preserve ALL the text in a "Track Changes" Word document, and provided a link in your post to this old 2012 content.

You can achieve the ALL parameter in the first paragraph only by using MS Word on the Mac (or Windows) as it is the only application that opens Word documents in their own native document architecture. All other word processing/DTP applications attempt conversion of the opened Word document into their own proprietary, or open document (ODT) format — a potentially lossy process that varies by the application's Word support. All variants of Pages are no exception.

The posts in this thread that predate yours involve Pages '09 and predates its last (v4.3) update by a day - Dec 4, 2012.