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I have got loads of files from about 10+ years ago or so. When I try to open them it says old version of appleworks can't open. Is there any software that can extract the text, I'm not bothered about formating or anything else, just the raw text.
It sounds as if you have AppleWorks 5 documents. Pages can open AppleWorks 6 Word Processing documents, but not AppleWorks 5, and the same is true of LibreOffice.
Panergy Software's docXConverter v3.2 ($19.95) can convert Appleworks 5 and 6 Word Processing documents to RTF (though it has been reported that it can only handle documents which contain only text, not those which include images or frames). This may well be your only option.
All this applies to Word Processing documents. Nothing will open AW Database documents.
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 install and run AppleWorks 6 as an emergency measure if you have the install disks for it - this will open v5 documents and save them as AW6 ones, which Pages can open.
I found "OpenOffice Viewer and Converter" online (it opened in my Firefox browser) and used that to convert my old appleworks spreadsheet files to a viewable PDF file. I didn't need to make changes in my files so that worked for me.
old appleworks files
