Opening a .pages file on a Mac that does not have the Pages app

I downloaded it straight from gmail and tried to open it in Preview without success. What actually worked was changing the extension to .zip and then unzipping, opening the resulting folder, and open the preview .pdf that was created.

Apple's choice of proprietary, versus overwhelming industry acceptance of other document standards has been an ongoing issue for document interchange — even among its own applications. However...

Reading your comments about the applications that you claim do not open Pages documents, suggests to me that you didn't even bother to use Preview, which has viewed all versions of Pages documents since at least Snow Leopard, and continues to do so in High Sierra. There simply is no hoop when you right-click on a Pages document and see Preview among the Open With sub-menu applications.

Of course, if you corrupted the Pages document attempting to open it with Google Docs (which has never supported the document format), or attempted to double-click the document on a Windows filesystem, then Preview would show the same prejudice as it would with any damaged document, including Word, and PDF.

You can only count on that internal PDF presence when the original creator of the Pages '08/'09 document chose to check Include preview in document by default in Pages Preferences : General. Pages v5 and v6 documents do not have an internal PDF representation of the document.

The inability of a Mac to open an iWork .pages document without going through some hoops is simply silly. I ended up just asking the sender to send me a .pdf because I couldn't open an Apple doc with a Mac using preview, text edit, google docs or open office. Not even gibberish that I could extract the address I needed from the document. smh

What worked for me to open Pages files on a Mac that does not have it is first to download the latest version of LibreOffice https://www.libreoffice.org/download/download/. Install this. Now: 1) Select the Pages file you want to open by clicking once on the file. 2) Hold down the Command key and the letter I while the file is still highlighted. This will show the information about this file. 3) Scroll down to the "OPEN WITH" dialogue. Select OTHER. 4) Select LIBRE OFFICE. 5) If you want to change all your Pages files to open with LibreOffice, click on the CHANGE ALL button which is found right under the OPEN WITH dialogue. 6) Now double click on the Pages file you want to open. It will likely not open with the proper formatting but all the text will be there. 7) Click on the text anywhere and then do SELECT ALL (hold down the command key and hit the letter A). 8) Hit copy (command C) 9) Open up Text Edit which comes on every Mac 10) Paste the copied file into TextEdit. All your formatting should now be there. You can either save it as it is in Text Edit, or select all and paste it right back into LibreOffice. NOTE: It might be possible to develop an AppleScript to automate this process and fix all your former Pages files so that they all open up automatically in LibreOffice. Also note that you can see the file in its original formatting using Preview (on all Macs) but it opens it as an image file and you cannot change any of the text. It will let you print however. TextEdit also will not open a Pages file directly. You have to go through LIbreOffice. All of this work is apparently because Apple wants Mac users to upgrade to Sierra and is obsoleting Pages, Keynote and Numbers programs so that they no longer work without upgrading.

Although LibreOffice v5.4.0 will open (some) Pages '09 v4, and Pages v5 documents, it isn't pretty, and certainly not better than opening the documents via Pages for iCloud — where formatting is retained. A three paragraph Pages v5 document will open in LO v5.4.0 with one paragraph per page. That is not a win.

The only way I can think of (other than installing Pages on your Mac) would be to use your internet browser (e.g., Safari), log in to https://www.icloud.com/, go to iCloud Drive there and manually upload the file (or copy the file to iCloud Drive on your Mac if you have that turned on and let it sync to iCloud). Then use the Pages app at https://www.icloud.com/

You may be right, but are you sure? Since it only involves using a computer browser I think you may be able to do it from even a Windows computer.

1. Use a browser and log in to iCloud.com and manually upload the file.

2. Use the browser and open the Pages app there.

That would work for me from any computer -- but the thing that I'm not sure of is that the iCloud Drive folder there would be available for a manual upload if it had never been previously used from a Mac or iOS device.

Baby steps. Have you tried it?

It just works in Safari, nothing much to do with what OS you are running.

Peter

Can you open that Pages document in the Preview.app?

Ask the document sender to resend the document either as a PDF (read-only), or Word (if you are expected to edit it).

If you do not have a Word compatible word processor, get the free LibreOffice. If you were sent a Pages '09 single-file format document, you may be able to open it in LibreOffice Writer. It won't handle Pages v5 documents though.