Home Forums Mac Software Mac Applications Clarisworks converter?

A company just sent our newspaper a couple of news releases in Clarisworks format. I've Googled my fingers off looking for a converter to Word. Anybody got any leads or know how to open .CWK files? Thanks.

AppleWorks is probably the best choice (if there even is a choice).

If the above does not work because of the age of the format (too old to be opened), MacLink Plus Deluxe can also do the job.

A company just sent our newspaper a couple of news releases in Clarisworks format.

Obviously OLD news!

Maclink Plus (up to vers 12 or 14 now I think?)

It converts to Appleworks 5 format, which Appleworks 6 will open. (and require you to resave in vers 6 format)

Thanks for the replies. Looks like Maclink Plus sells for about $80. Can't see doing that ... telling the sender to give us something we can use instead.

I wonder if perhaps you may have over-Googled this situation. I highly doubt anyone is actually *running* ClarisWorks today. I'll go so far as to wager that those probably are AppleWorks files. [i.e., did someone actually tell you they were definitely composed in ClarisWorks... or did you surmise that strictly from googling the .cwk extension?]

---> Because AppleWorks itself continued to use the ".cwk" extension. <---

And if you're lucky enough that they were saved by AppleWorks version 6,
then Pages can open those documents.

Sender should be able to choose a Word format to save files in. AppleWorks (or Pages?) would open the CW files, and give more "modern" Word version choices.

People are still very much in the dark ages, especially in the publishing business.

Last year I helped a small newspaper upgrade from:
- five imac g3's, all running os 8.6 and 9. Thankfully ALL slot loaders, tho several without firewire.
- one of the imacs was their fileserver, and its CRT had been dead for over a year
- two powermac g4's (OS 9) and one powermac g3 (8.5)

ancient versions of photoshop (pre CS for sure... photoshop 4?), quark 3.5 I think, and ancient pagemaker had to all be upgraded as well of course

They had to dump absolutely everything (hardware AND software) since they had waited so long that nothing was backward compatible. And yes they were using clarisworks. I didn't see any beige powermacs when I was there but I bet they had a couple stashed in closets somewhere. I KNOW I saw an ADB keyboard. Their entire network was CAT-3. Had to fight some Works documents too, those are always a PITA.


Publishing is absolutely the WORST about not upgrading. A publisher can use a typewriter and get the job done, so they have no serious motivation to plunk down money to upgrade. "but this still works FINE!" Then when the time finally comes (due to force, in this case too few working computers left and nothing repairable) and everything but the carpet has to be replaced.