I have a pages file that I can no longer open though I can view it in preview. Is there any way I can retrieve my data in a workable format? It is just text so I don't care about formatting. I just want my text back!!!
thanks.
Pages-OTHER, OS X Yosemite (10.10.4)
If this is a “damaged” Pages v5.5.3 document, press and hold the shift key when you attempt to open the document with Pages v5.5.3.
If that does not work, open the document as you have done in Preview, and in sequence, select all (command-A), copy, and paste into a new, open Pages v5.5.3 document. Reformat and Save.
Thanks so much! I have copied and pasted the image into a new file. Is there a way I can convert the image to editable text now?
The solution that I provided previously will only work where you have pure text when opened in Preview. It sound to me as though you have what I have — Pages v5 documents that have a mixture of text and images with text flow. This content will not permit just text selection, and when pasted into Pages, is an image file. You will need optical character recognition (OCR) software to extract the text from this form of Pages document viewed in Preview.
My cheap (as in free) OCR solution:
I have a Google Drive account. In the Drive settings, there is an option to convert uploaded files into Google Docs format. I uploaded a jpeg image of text and graphics, and initially, it opened in Google Docs as a full page selectable image (just like in Pages). I then hit backspace, and it gave me just the text. The same approach can be followed with the PDF exported from that Pages document in Preview. Initially, you see your PDF in the default Google viewer, and after a backspace, you get just the selectable text without the images. Well, most of the text, as small areas of the content are slightly mangled. You can copy/paste this text back into Pages v5.
The OS X App Store has many OCR solutions (search term: OCR), and the free ones are very limited in ability without an in-app upgrade. If you wind up here, you will want to read the reviews, and the ability of the application to extract text from PDF documents, and image files. You will find that functionally good OCR software is expensive.
Corrupted pages file
