opening a apple document in word

Brie

Hey technoids!

I've got a document that I wrote on a mac (hateful things) that I need to open in word.  any easy ideas on how to do that?  I have saved it to a folder as a page file but can't open it with word so assume it needs to be "translated" somehow.  It's a basic type of doc - just words, lists, some bullet points.   No tables or anything fancy at all.

Neil_Jones

What did you do it in on the Mac?  Pages?

Other than accessing iCloud through a browser, no program can officially view or edit a Pages file using Windows or Linux.

You might want to try Word's "recover text from any file" filter.

Failing that:

https://appletoolbox.com/how-to-open-macs-pages-file-format-on-microsoft-windows/ might be of interest and a couple of other ideas.

Brie

can't see any recover text filter anywhere and the appletool page doesn't offer much hope.

I've gone back to my oh so not at all techie bros and have asked him to do a cut and paste from the page doc and put that directly into the body of an email.  That should do the trick.  Assuming he can cut and paste.

Neil_Jones

here you go:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBCcPs3jK-0

DullGreyGuy

Brie said:

Hey technoids!

I've got a document that I wrote on a mac (hateful things) that I need to open in word.  any easy ideas on how to do that?  I have saved it to a folder as a page file but can't open it with word so assume it needs to be "translated" somehow.  It's a basic type of doc - just words, lists, some bullet points.   No tables or anything fancy at all.

What application did you use? What file extension does the file have? How long ago was it?

Whilst clearly you've got issues (with Mac) if you know anyone with an Apple device, even an iPhone, they can convert it for you. You can also just change the file extension to .zip and if you then open the file you will see a PDF of your document which modern versions of Word can open.

Brie

@Neil_Jones
can't see how to get to that precisely but will keep trying.

Brie

@DullGreyGuy
It was originally a "page" doc which I changed to docx.  and that doesn't work.  I'll see if going back to the original and saving again and using .zip works any better.  

I'm sure mac would be find if I used it more than once every couple of years.  I'm very much an "office" person accustomed to word and excel and so it's not easy to use something different when I'm visiting my office allergic family.  Not helped by being in Canada and so the keyboard is completely wonky as well.  (& they insist on using the mouse on the right which is very inconvenient!!)

Neil_Jones

Brie said:

@DullGreyGuy
It was originally a "page" doc which I changed to docx.  and that doesn't work.  I'll see if going back to the original and saving again and using .zip works any better.  

I'm sure mac would be find if I used it more than once every couple of years.  I'm very much an "office" person accustomed to word and excel and so it's not easy to use something different when I'm visiting my office allergic family.  Not helped by being in Canada and so the keyboard is completely wonky as well.  (& they insist on using the mouse on the right which is very inconvenient!!)

You can't just change the extension to a .docx and have Word open it.  Doens't work like that.

You can't save a file as a ZIP file, again they don't work like that.

What you really need to do is change the extension that Pages has saved it as to a ZIP and then you should be able to open that with any unzipper.  in theory.

If you watch the video I posted it tells you what to do to how to get to the "recover text from any file" option.

The traditional position for a mouse has always been on the right by the way

DullGreyGuy

Excel, Word etc all work on Mac's too... even natively on the M1/M2 processors.  The only let down at the moment is that Teams runs through Rosetta on modern macs so reduces my battery life to about 10 hours.

I'm with you on the keyboard thing, forever changing between UK Windows, US Windows, UK Mac and ISO Spanish Mac depending on which client I am working for and which computer at home. 

DullGreyGuy

Neil_Jones said:

Brie said:

@DullGreyGuy
It was originally a "page" doc which I changed to docx.  and that doesn't work.  I'll see if going back to the original and saving again and using .zip works any better.  

I'm sure mac would be find if I used it more than once every couple of years.  I'm very much an "office" person accustomed to word and excel and so it's not easy to use something different when I'm visiting my office allergic family.  Not helped by being in Canada and so the keyboard is completely wonky as well.  (& they insist on using the mouse on the right which is very inconvenient!!)

You can't just change the extension to a .docx and have Word open it.  Doens't work like that.

You can't save a file as a ZIP file, again they don't work like that.

You are correct on the first but incorrect on the second... MacOS has a number of bespoke file extensions that are really just archive files... a .pages file is just an archive containing a jpg of the first page and PDF

Brie

Neil_Jones said:

What you really need to do is change the extension that Pages has saved it as to a ZIP and then you should be able to open that with any unzipper.  in theory.

If you watch the video I posted it tells you what to do to how to get to the "recover text from any file" option.

The traditional position for a mouse has always been on the right by the way

I'll keep looking for a way to change the extension properly.  I looked at the video but can't see anything like "recover text" and CTL-F12 so far hasn't worked at all.  Likely I'm missing something with that.

Yeah - mouse positions....I'm a predominantly (but not completely) righty surrounded by almost exclusively lefties (except for baseball and cricket - go figure) and yet I'm the only one that needs to mouse on the left.