DaveWT
Well-Known Member
We have been warned for years that we should have dealt with .cwk files long ago, (Clarisworks / Appleworks documents) as the current macOS and apps can no longer open them. I was sure I had done that!
But after upgrading to Catalina I was roaming all over my iMac testing that everything was still working as expected, and in my Documents folder my eyes happened to settle on a four of the dreaded .cwk files. Two of them were text documents of little importance now, but the other two were dimensioned drawings that I thought would be nice to preserve. So I did some searching to see what, if anything, would still open them and LibreOffice was suggested.
But before I bothered with that, another idea popped into my head. I have an old iMac G4 (iLamp) that I keep just as piece of neat Apple history and I wondered what was on it. So I booted it up, (10.3.9) and found AppleWorks 6 installed.
Back to my Catalina iMac I grabbed a thumb drive formatted for the Mac and copied a couple of the .cwk files over. But alas, the Mac disk format has evolved and the older iMac could not read the thumb drives. So next I grabbed another thumb drive I keep around formatted for MS DOS and repeated the experiment.
This time, the old iMac was happy and I could open the files in AppleWorks, and then re-save them in a number of other formats (jpeg, MacPaint and Win BMP) all of which I can open on the new iMac. Of course I won't be able to edit the drawings but at least I have saved the information. The other text files were easily converted from .cwk to .txt and .rtf files.
And for the record, I later tried LibreOffice and it also opens the .cwk files, and before anyone jumps all over me, the old iMac is NOT connected to the network for security reasons.
Dave Teece
But after upgrading to Catalina I was roaming all over my iMac testing that everything was still working as expected, and in my Documents folder my eyes happened to settle on a four of the dreaded .cwk files. Two of them were text documents of little importance now, but the other two were dimensioned drawings that I thought would be nice to preserve. So I did some searching to see what, if anything, would still open them and LibreOffice was suggested.
But before I bothered with that, another idea popped into my head. I have an old iMac G4 (iLamp) that I keep just as piece of neat Apple history and I wondered what was on it. So I booted it up, (10.3.9) and found AppleWorks 6 installed.
Back to my Catalina iMac I grabbed a thumb drive formatted for the Mac and copied a couple of the .cwk files over. But alas, the Mac disk format has evolved and the older iMac could not read the thumb drives. So next I grabbed another thumb drive I keep around formatted for MS DOS and repeated the experiment.
This time, the old iMac was happy and I could open the files in AppleWorks, and then re-save them in a number of other formats (jpeg, MacPaint and Win BMP) all of which I can open on the new iMac. Of course I won't be able to edit the drawings but at least I have saved the information. The other text files were easily converted from .cwk to .txt and .rtf files.
And for the record, I later tried LibreOffice and it also opens the .cwk files, and before anyone jumps all over me, the old iMac is NOT connected to the network for security reasons.
Dave Teece
