Open a ClarisWorks file — and save it as something modern
Maybe it came off a box of floppies from the garage, or a Zip disk labeled in your mother’s handwriting, or the hard drive of a Performa that hasn’t been switched on since the Clinton administration. ClarisWorks documents are everywhere in family archives — school newsletters, recipes, letters, the first chapters of somebody’s novel — and nothing on a modern computer will open them. This page will. Drop the file here and it’s read directly in your browser, then handed back to you as a document that opens in Word, Pages, or LibreOffice, plus a plain-text copy and an instant preview. The conversion happens entirely on your own machine using LibreOffice’s own libmwaw filters compiled to run in the browser. Nothing is uploaded anywhere — documents this personal shouldn’t have to pass through a stranger’s server just to be read again.
About ClarisWorks
ClarisWorks arrived in 1991 from Claris, the software company Apple had spun off a few years earlier, and it did something clever: instead of bolting five separate programs together, it was one small, fast application where word-processing, spreadsheet, database, drawing, and painting could all live in the same document as “frames.” You could drop a live spreadsheet into the middle of a letter in 1992, on a Mac with four megabytes of memory. That elegance made it enormously popular — it was bundled with Performa-series Macs, dominated American classrooms, and even got a Windows version in 1993. When Apple absorbed Claris back into itself in 1998, ClarisWorks was renamed AppleWorks (borrowing the name of Apple’s old Apple II suite) and carried on until 2007, when Apple retired it in favor of iWork. The .cwk files it left behind span more than fifteen years of home and school computing, which is exactly why so many of them are sitting in family archives today.
Frequently asked questions
Do my files get uploaded to a server?
No. The converter is a small engine (about 2 MB) that downloads into your browser once and then does all the work on your own computer — it even keeps working if you go offline. Your ClarisWorks files never leave your machine, and the originals are never modified.
My file has no extension. How do I know it’s ClarisWorks?
That’s normal — classic Mac OS didn’t use file extensions, so ClarisWorks files copied off old disks often have no .cwk on the end. You don’t need to know or guess: drop the file in and the tool identifies the format by reading the file’s actual contents. It can even see through BinHex (.hqx) wrappers from old file transfers.
Will the formatting survive? What do I actually get back?
You get an .odt file — which opens in modern Microsoft Word, LibreOffice, and Apple Pages — plus a plain-text version and an inline preview. Fonts, styles, and layout are preserved wherever the library can recover them; very complex page layouts may come out simplified, but the text itself comes through.
My ClarisWorks file is a spreadsheet or database. Will that work?
Not yet. Right now the converter handles word-processing documents. It will still recognize a ClarisWorks spreadsheet, database, or drawing and tell you what it is, but full conversion of those document types is planned rather than shipped. Letters, essays, and other text documents convert today.