can I open a cwk file with another application?

• Word Processing documents can be opened directly only in Pages (AppleWorks 6 only).
• Draw Documents can be opened directly only in EazyDraw (the more expensive version from their website, not the cheaper one from the Mac App Store, and you will need v4.0 'Retro' not the most recent version) or Intaglio (though this appears not to be able to handle very complex drawings).
• Spreadsheets can be opened directly only in Numbers.
• Presentations can be opened directly only in Keynote.
• Nothing will open Paint or Database documents

You may find this article helpful:

http://rfwilmut.net/aw

Find out in this link :

http://www.fileinfo.com/extension/cwk

sagararyal wrote:

Find out in this link :

http://www.fileinfo.com/extension/cwk

Hi Al,

While this would have been a useful response during the 14 minutes between gseeber's question and Roger Wilmut's response, its usefulness 14 days later is questionable.

fileinfo makes no mention of AW Drawing, Painting, or Database files, all included in Roger's post.

Thanks (seriously) for taking the time to post. Take a bit more next time, though, and check to see if your post will add to the information already available in the thread.

Regards,

Barry

I see you are still using OS X Snow Leopard. This means that - for the time being - you can still run AppleWorks in Rosetta. Your short term solution might be to pick up a copy of AW6 from eBay (I'm assuming you didn't back it up??)

Once you have AW again, you can convert all your important .cwk files so they can be opened in a variety of other apps :

WP - save as RTF for TextEdit, or as Word; Pages will open both?

SS - save as Excel for both Excel and Numbers

PT - save as JPEG or TIFF or PNG or Photoshop; any graphics editor program will open these

DR - save as a graphics (picture) format (see PT), you will lose individual layers

DB - some can be imported into Bento but there's a limitation to what gets converted

christopher rigby1 wrote:

WP - save as RTF for TextEdit, or as Word; Pages will open both?

No need to do that as long as it's AW6 - Pages will open word processing documents directly

SS - save as Excel for both Excel and Numbers

Numbers will open AW6 spreadsheets directly.

DB - some can be imported into Bento but there's a limitation to what gets converted

Neither Bento nor anything else will open AW databases: you have to export as ASCII and this can be imported into any database program: however you will lost all formatting and calculations fields will bring over the result not the calculation.

Oh right. However, the conversion of WP and SS documents would still be useful if - for example - one has Office and doesn't want to have to get Pages and Numbers.

For assistance with the Draw and Paint modules of the original "cwk" ClarisWorks or AppleWorks documents, print the documents as Adobe Acrobat PDF's and it will be possible to rebuild them in another application. In addition, if you include the native fonts in the PDF, you'll be able to use them as well, provided they are still compatible with modern font formats. TrueType and Type 1 are still usable. But you will see a marked degeneration in quality in modern-day documents (although some continue to prefer them).

Note that if your old "cwk" documents predate ClarisWorks3 you may have to use some of your old translators to get them to work compatibly with Acrobat.

Many of my older documents (all now post CW3) do require an earlier version of Acrobat. But most are now simply archived as PDF's for simplicity.

Databases are a different animal entirely. Even in the original CW3 and later formats they could be somewhat unstable. So best to export the data to a new database format.

If your databases are extensive, maybe migrating to FileMaker would be a good idea. (Topic for another discussion.)

Note that this post is late as I am new to this forum after years of absence.

George.