Open an Acta outline
Researchers, lawyers, and writers used Acta to organize everything — book chapters, case notes, family trees, to-do lists that outlived the decade. Those outlines are still sitting on old disks, unreadable, usually without so much as a file extension. This page opens them. Choose or drag in your file and it’s converted on the spot to a .odt document you can open in Word, LibreOffice, or Pages, or to plain text, with an inline preview so you can see what you’ve got immediately. The conversion happens entirely in your browser — a one-time ~2MB engine download, offline-capable afterward — so nothing you drop here is ever uploaded, and your original file is never modified. For irreplaceable material, that matters: you can verify the contents without risking the source.
About Acta
Acta came out of the golden age of Mac outliners. Written by David Dunham and published by Symmetry Corporation in 1986, it took a different path from its heavyweight rivals: instead of being a full application, Acta was a desk accessory, meaning it could pop up inside any other program you were running — a startlingly modern idea on a machine that couldn’t truly multitask. That made it the quick-capture tool of its day: jot an outline while writing in MacWrite, reorganize it, paste it back. Acta grew through several versions, with Acta 7 arriving in the early 1990s, and Dunham later released Acta Classic free of charge, which kept the program in use long after Symmetry was gone. Countless research notes, lecture plans, and manuscripts began life as Acta outlines. The format itself was never publicly documented, but the Document Liberation Project reverse-engineered it for libmwaw — the same open-source filters LibreOffice relies on, and the engine doing the work when you convert a file on this page.
Frequently asked questions
Does converting my outline involve uploading it?
No. The entire conversion runs in your browser via WebAssembly. Your file stays on your computer from start to finish — nothing is sent over the network, and the tool keeps working even if you go offline after loading the page.
My Acta files have no extensions. How will the tool recognize them?
By content, not by name. Classic Mac software rarely used extensions, so the converter inspects the bytes of the file itself to identify Acta outlines — including files still wrapped in BinHex (.hqx) from old archives.
Will the result open properly in Word or LibreOffice?
Yes. You get a standard .odt file that Word, LibreOffice, and Pages all open. Text formatting is preserved where it can be recovered from the original file.
What happens to the outline structure itself?
It converts as structured text: each topic and subtopic comes through with its hierarchy intact, as indented, ordered content. You lose the collapse-and-expand interactivity — that lived in the app, not the file — but the organization of your outline is fully preserved.