Opening AppleWorks Documents in 2010

Hello

Check that your documents may be open with AW 629. If they are, keep a copy of AW 629 which is usable on every Mac that we may buy today.

This let think that we will be available to open them for many years.

Some features are unavailable in other applications. So it will be difficult to clone some documents in other products.

In fact your question is perhaps not sufficiently precise.

Perhaps saving your docs as PDF files would be sufficient to fit your needs.

Yvan KOENIG (from FRANCE samedi 15 avril 2006 21:03:44)

Assuming the demise of
AppleWorks over the next few years, will there be a
practical way to continue being able to open and read
AppleWorks documents?

Yes, and No. It depends what you understand by "demise".
AppleWorks, in its current (and probably last) version will continue to work on the machine and operating system that you now have indefinitely. It can be transferred to the now current intel machines, and to future Macs as long as those machines include Rosetta, or some other means of running OS X (G4/G5) software. As long as those things are true, the most practical and convenient way of opening and reading AppleWorks documents will be to use AppleWorks.

Beyond that, the answer depends on which type of AppleWorks document you are trying to open. More on that below.

And if not, is there a quick
way to reformat them with another word processing
application?

Word processing documents are the easiest to convert to other formats, or to recover the data from. Results are best for wp docs containing only (formatted text). For those with inserted objects (graphics, spreadsheet frames, text frames), success will vary depending on the target format and application.

iWork (Pages) will open AppleWorks 6 WP documents and preserve formatting.
MS Word 2004 (Mac) has been reported to open AW WP docs.
icWord will convert AW WP docs to MS Word format.
Most Text editors (including Text Editor, suppied with current Macs, will open and recover the Text from an AppleWorks WP document.
There are likely other applications that can do this as well.

AW Spreadsheet documents can be opened or converted using icExcel, or (again reported) MS Excel.
Spreadsheet documents can also be saved as Text (or ASCII). The result is a tab-delimited text file that can be opened into most spreadsheet applications. To transfer formulas (rather than their calculated results), go Options > Display... and check Show Formulas before saving as Text. Other Save as formats that may be available to you, depending on the history of AppleWorks versions that have been on your machine, are DIF and SYLK, both of which will preserve more of the SS formulas and/or formatting than will plain text.

For database documents, the main option appears to be transferring the data
using Save as...Text. Again, most DB applications should be able to import from the tab-delimited text file produced by this method.

Paint and Draw documents can be saved in a number of graphics formats, but the result is usually some sort of compressed bitmap file that loses detail, and in the case of Draw documents, loses the vector graphics characteristic of Draw.

All of the above list is based on very limited experience, so other posters will likely be able to add to what I've said.

Regards,
Barry

Hello

I agree with quite all what Barry wrote.

The main problem is the fact that with AppleWorks we may have links between documents and these links will be difficult to preserve.

For the database document, I am really surprised.

Based on many experiments, I wrote several times that "Save as text" keeps only the first 255 chars of a text field. This morning, I made a new try and, surprise, a field containing 953 characters was passed with its entire contents. And I discovered that returns embedded in a text field are removed so the field will be quite easy to transfer in an other DB app.
One other drawbacks is really here. If we are using a french AppleWorks for instance using our decimal delimiter: the comma, using "Save as text" replaces the comma by a period.

Other problem, as far as I know, there is no way to save, automatically, the formulas dedicated to each DB field.
A tip to do that quite easily by hand is to work with two apps. I uses AW6 and Textedit.
I open the field definition dialog, click options to be able to copy the formula then I paste it in a TextEdit document.
With this tip, no need to open/close each time the field definition dialog.

For the spreadsheet the need to grab the formulas is not so important as the "save as Excel" translator translates the formulas directly.
For those wishing to keep track of the original formulas, I already passed a script building a description of an entire spreadsheet with all the embedded formulas.

Yvan KOENIG (from FRANCE dimanche 16 avril 2006 09:42:43)