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gloveman3

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jul 6, 2022
14
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I have some old files that have the Appleworks extension or were made in Appleworks. Is there any way to convert these files to at least an RTF file?
 
It's been awhile, but if I remember correctly, you can use Save As to convert to RTF and Word file formats but only one at a time.
 
Tried Text edit and opened a document with a .cwk extension, I get a lot of gobbedly gook.
 
Indeed, LibreOffice seems to be the only modern application that can open AppleWorks/ClarisWorks files, although not necessarily every version of those. More complicated but something that can work in a pinch is you can run an emulator for Mac OS 9 and run actual AppleWorks or ClarisWorks inside that, and then do an export.
 
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Indeed, LibreOffice seems to be the only modern application that can open AppleWorks/ClarisWorks files, although not necessarily every version of those. More complicated but something that can work in a pinch is you can run an emulator for Mac OS 9 and run actual AppleWorks or ClarisWorks inside that, and then do an export.
I have seen the OS 7 emulator that you can work through the safari browser. I have not seen where to get or use an OS 9 emulator.
 
Try LibreOffice.
It may be able to read those files directly.

You can then save them in LibreOffice or export to another format.
 
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I have seen the OS 7 emulator that you can work through the safari browser. I have not seen where to get or use an OS 9 emulator.
If you do a Google search for "Mac OS 9 emulator" and see the project page on columbia-dot-edu, might be the second result, that's the one I'm talking about. However, I'd only use that as a back-up plan; the LibreOffice solution should be tried first, much simpler.
 
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Indeed, LibreOffice seems to be the only modern application that can open AppleWorks/ClarisWorks files,

I used LibreOffice to convert quite a lot of old AppleWorks and ClarisWorks files (I used those programs for many years before giving in and switching to MS Office). This worked pretty well for most files, with some minor formatting issues in Excel. My ex also used Clarisworks/Appleworks heavily in the past, so when I set her up on a MacBook Air I installed LibreOffice, which she still uses because she doesn't want to migrate to MS Office or Pages.
 
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