silhouettes
Level 1
(10 points)
Q: How do I open Appleworks documents with linked spreadsheets in Pages?
I have a number of old Appleworks (.cwk) documents which I would like to open. Most of the time they open easily in Pages or Numbers as appropriate, but a particular series of them are word-processing documents which contain a series of linked spreadsheet tables embedded in them This was a feature of Appleworks that did not translate into the new iWorks apps if I recall. The problem is that when I open them in Pages only the first spreadsheet appears as a table, the others are missing along with all the data they contain. I do get an error message telling me this has happened, but no clue as to what to do about it! If I try to open them in Numbers I simply get told these are not spreashseet documents (which is true).
Has anybody else encountered this? If so is there a trick to make Pages open them properly, or another App which may be able to open them? Failing that do you know any way I can at least recover the data contained in the subsequent linked spreadsheets?
iMac, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.1)
Roger Wilmut1
Level 9
(78,510 points)
I have my doubts that you are going to be able to do this.You could try LibreOffice, which apparently can open WP documents which have at least some embedded items, but it's very probable that it won't handle this.
There are two other options. One is to open the documents in a plain text editor. You will get an awful lot of garbage which is the formatting code, but the actual text will be in there somewhere. Whether it's possible to find and extract the data from the spreadsheets I don't know, but it's unlikely to be easy.
The other option is to run AppleWorks under emulation. If you have upgraded to Lion/Mountain Lion then you should be able to install Snow Leopard on an external hard disk and start from that (provided that the Mac did not come with anything higher than Snow Leopard originally installed); and success has been reported in running Snow Leopard under emulation in Parallels - the method is described here: it seems complex; however Snow Leopard Server is available in the Apple Store (by telephone) at a reduced price (at the time of writing) and this makes the process a lot easier. I haven't tried either method: use at your own discretion. You can then run AppleWorks as an emergency measure.
