A friend who does not believe in backups recently found that his old G5 iMac had gone to the happy apple orchard in the sky.
He has just bought a new iMac and the .cwk files were recovered from his old computer's hard drive but they refuse to open in Pages, TextEdit etc.
Is there any (inexpensive) way of opening them?
OS X Yosemite (10.10.1), Mac mini i5 2.5GHz & iMac FCP X
Only you can decide if you trust the developer of LibreOffice. I've personally never had a problem with any LibreOffice download nor have many other long-time posters in these forums that I am aware of.
Take a look at this Apple support article for your options on opening apps from other developers.
I can't seem to get libreoffice to successfully download to my OS 10.10.5 Mac. I get so far, then get a message that it can't be downloaded because security preferences only allow for downloads from the App Store, or recognized 3rd party providers, otherwise there's a risk that you're downloading malware. I occurred to me that there's probably a way around the security preferences, but then I ask myself, do I feel lucky punk? Can anyone vouch there's no malware in Libre?
YES THEY CAN . . . . as I have just discovered.
LibreOffice (FREE) will open both word processing documents and spreadsheets.
Old cwk files will also open with Pages 4.3. If you have or had this version, it is not removed from Applications when updating to Pages 5 (now 5.5.2) unless you choose to do so. Once opened in 4.3, a document can be saved in pages format and then opened with Pages 5. Pages 5 offers to convert to a newer format (which I believe Pages 4 will no longer read).
Pages versions 1 through 4 can open AppleWorks 6 word processing files. They cannot open AppleWorks 5 or any version of ClarisWorks files. Keynote 5 & earlier can open AppleWorks 6 presentation files & Numbers 1 & 2 can open AppleWorks 6 spreadsheet files. A simpler answer is to suggest LibreOffice that can open many, but not all, types of AppleWorks & ClarisWorks documents as the OP discovered.
Very helpful further explanation, Peggy. I tried LibreOffice on a variety of old files and got all of them to open. Can save opened docs in Word formats (such as docx) but did not see a way to save directly to a pages format. Still, this is going to save me a lot of time. No more resorting to MacLink Plus in Snow Leopard (which I have in a separate partition on my mid-2010 iMac for odd apps that don't run in Yosemite and may require Rosetta) for translations to more modern formats. Thanks!
Thanks for both your responses which should clarify things for anyone else with this problem.
I rarely use Pages and never use Numbers or Keynote . . . wouldn't know how.
LibreOffice seems to be a very simple and efficient way of dealing with all manner of files both old and new . . . pity Apple can't take a few leaves out of its book!
Even if LibreOffice supported saving as .pages, I wouldn't do it. Apple is constantly changing the format these days so that different versions of Pages 5 can't open documents from other versions of Pages 5. Sometimes it can't even open documents from the same version if they were made on a different Mac.
As much as I dislike Microsoft & Word, the .doc format is a much safer one to use. Personally, I refuse to use Pages 5 & am sticking with Pages 4.3. When I ever find the time (isn't that what we all say?) I plan on learning LibreOffice to do the things I used AppleWorks & then Pages & Numbers to do.
Words doc and docx format are a useful lingua franca (as are Excels xls and xlsx formats) whatever you use they are the best formats to save files in.
Can Appleworks .cwk files be opened on a new Yosemite iMac?
