Open a BeagleWorks or WordPerfect Works document
Whether the label on the disk says BeagleWorks or WordPerfect Works, the files inside are the same format — and equally unreadable on any modern computer. They surface in estates and attic boxes from the early 1990s: household letters, school projects, the minutes of long-dissolved clubs. This tool opens them in seconds. Drop a file into the page and it’s converted in your browser to a .odt document that Word, LibreOffice, and Pages can open, or to plain text, with an inline preview so you can check the contents at a glance. Because the conversion engine runs locally as WebAssembly, your file never travels to a server and the original is never written to or changed. First use downloads a compact ~2MB engine; after that, the page works even offline.
About BeagleWorks / WordPerfect Works
BeagleWorks carried one of the best-loved names in personal computing. Beagle Bros was the legendary Apple II software house famous for clever utilities and the funniest, most human manuals and ads in the industry — old woodcut art, jokes in the margins, tips printed on the packaging. BeagleWorks, released in 1992, was the company’s big leap to the Macintosh: an integrated suite with a word processor, spreadsheet, database, drawing, painting, and communications modules, notable for in-place editing of embedded parts before that was commonplace. It was capable and well reviewed, but Beagle Bros lacked the marketing muscle to fight ClarisWorks and Microsoft Works, and in 1993 the product was sold to WordPerfect Corporation, which rebranded it WordPerfect Works. Beagle Bros itself wound down soon after; WordPerfect discontinued the Works line by the mid-1990s amid its own upheavals. The shared file format was eventually reverse-engineered by the Document Liberation Project for libmwaw — LibreOffice’s legacy-Mac filter library, and the engine this converter uses to read both BeagleWorks and WordPerfect Works documents.
Frequently asked questions
Will my family’s documents stay private?
Yes. The conversion happens entirely on your own computer — the engine runs in your browser and no part of your file is ever uploaded or stored anywhere. You could load this page, disconnect from the internet, and convert with the connection off.
I don’t know whether my file is BeagleWorks or WordPerfect Works, and it has no extension.
You don’t need to know. The two share one format, and the converter detects it automatically from the file’s contents — names and extensions are ignored. BinHex (.hqx) wrapped files from old archives are read too.
Will formatting survive into Word or Pages?
The converter produces a .odt file that opens in Word, LibreOffice, and Pages, and it preserves fonts, styles, and layout wherever they can be recovered from the original document.
What about the spreadsheet and drawing parts of the suite?
Word-processing documents are what convert today. Spreadsheets, databases, and drawings created in BeagleWorks or WordPerfect Works are detected and identified, but converting them isn’t supported yet — that includes drawings embedded inside a word-processing file.