I'm still trying to convert some old ClarisWorks documents. Presently working with iMac 27" (intel) OS 10.9.2, Mavericks, but I am unable to open these old WP documents.
iMac, OS X Mavericks (10.9.2), intel
AppleWorks is .cwk. Last OS for that was Snow Leopard, which had Rosetta support for PPC apps like AW. Anything from 10.7 on doesn't.
Word Processing documents can be opened directly in Pages 4 (AppleWorks 6 only) but this is no longer available - the newPages 5 (Mavericks required) does not open AppleWorks documents. 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). The latest version of the free LibreOffice has announced that it can open AppleWorks 6 Word Processing documents and an ability to open ClarisWorks documents has been reported: it does appear to be able to handle at least some embedded images.
If you have upgraded to Lion/Mountain Lion/Mavericks and have AppleWorks documents you cannot open, 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 Server under emulation in Parallels - the method is described here: Snow Leopard Server is available in the Apple Store (by telephone) at a reduced price (at the time of writing) and is preferable to using ordinary Snow Leopard which is quite tricky. I haven't tried this myself: use at your own discretion. You can then run AppleWorks as an emergency measure.
Thanks. Can I download Snow Leopard to my Mac Pro laptop, (currently in OS 10.9.2 Mavericks), make the necessary conversions to AW and then to Pages?
If you have the original Snow Leopard install disks you can partition your hard disk and install SL on the new partition, provided that your Mac originally came with Snow Leopard. You would have to select the partition to boot into and then when finished boot back into Mavericks. You could also install Snow Leopard on an external hard disk with the same provisos, which is a lot simpler (and safer) procedure than partitioning.
Note my post above about which version of Pages will open AppleWorks documents (the current one won't). The latest version of AW, 6.2.9, is buggy when opening ClarisWorks files - you should use 6.2.4 or 6.2.7 if possible.
What is the last OS which would convert cwk files to AppleWorks?
