I am running OS X 10.11 El Capitan. For a while now I have not been able to open my old ClarisWorks documents. ( I think maybe since Appleworks 6 or so.) I have not thrown them out in case a solution would arise one day and thankfully I have found one. You can open old ClarisWorks document using Libre Office. It doesn’t seem to work on drawings, but it does work on word-processing documents.
- Download Libre Office from here. You can go for the “still” version or “fresh” version. The fresh version is new with more features but the still version is more stable, I went for the still version. Libra Office downloads for free, but after the download they offer for you to make a donation to them.
Step 1: download LibreOffice. - Go to your downloads folder and click on the downloaded file called ‘LibreOffice_5etc.dmg. Drag the Libre Office app to the Applications folder. This will install it.
Step 2: install LibreOffice by dragging it to your applications folder - Launch Libre Office by double clicking on it from your applications folder. It may take a while the first time that you launch it.
This is what Libre Office looks like in your applications folder. - In Libra Office click on ‘Open File’ or drag the file you want to open into Libre Office.
Step 4: Click ‘Open File’ and choose your ClarisWorks file that you want to open.
I had varying degrees of success opening old ClarisWorks documents in Libre Office.
Clarisworks and Appleworks drawings would open but I could not see the drawings, I could only see the text that was in the drawings.
In word processing documents, all the information seemed to be there but the formatting was not great.
It’s not going to open your documents perfectly, but it might allow you to get some information out of your old files that Pages won’t open.
For example, trying to open an old AppleWorks document in Apple Pages gave me this error below but LibraOffice opened the file. The formatting was a bit poor but I could at least get the information out that I wanted.
Once you have opened the file in Libra Office you have two options. You can copy the information and paste it into a new Pages document. Or you can save the file (Using ‘Save As) to save the file as a Microsoft Word document, which you can then import into Apple Pages.
Libra Office does not allow you to save as a Pages document.
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