Open a GreatWorks document
A surprising amount of early-1990s family paperwork — letters, school reports, church newsletters, small-business records — was written in GreatWorks, Symantec’s all-in-one suite for the Mac. Those files won’t open in anything now, and they rarely carry an extension to identify them. Here you can open them without installing a thing. Select or drag a file and the converter, running entirely inside your browser, turns GreatWorks word-processing documents into .odt files for Word, LibreOffice, or Pages, or into plain text, with an instant preview. The engine is about 2MB, downloads once, and works offline afterward. Your document is never uploaded to any server and the original is never modified — it’s read-only rescue, which is what you want when the file might be the only surviving copy.
About GreatWorks
GreatWorks was Symantec’s 1991 entry in the integrated-suite wars, aimed squarely at ClarisWorks and Microsoft Works: one affordable program combining a word processor, spreadsheet, database, drawing and painting tools, charting, and communications. Symantec — then busily acquiring Mac developers, including the makers of MORE and Think C — pitched GreatWorks at homes, schools, and small offices that wanted everything in one box, and it earned respectable reviews for the breadth of its modules. But ClarisWorks, with Apple’s weight behind it, won that market decisively, and Symantec was already pivoting toward the utilities and security software that would define the company. GreatWorks was discontinued around 1994 after a short life, stranding its users’ documents in a format nothing else could read. Decades later the Document Liberation Project reverse-engineered it for libmwaw, the open-source filter library behind LibreOffice’s legacy-Mac support — and behind this converter, which reads the word-processing documents GreatWorks left behind.
Frequently asked questions
Where does the conversion actually happen?
On your computer, inside your browser. The engine is WebAssembly, so there’s no server involved: your file is never uploaded, nothing is retained, and the tool keeps working even with your internet connection switched off.
None of these files have extensions. Is that a problem?
Not at all. The converter identifies GreatWorks files by examining their contents — classic Mac files rarely had extensions, and the tool never relies on them. BinHex (.hqx) wrapped files are handled as well.
Can I open the converted file in Word?
Yes. Output is a standard .odt document that opens in Microsoft Word, LibreOffice, and Apple Pages, with fonts, styles, and layout preserved wherever they can be recovered.
GreatWorks also made spreadsheets and drawings. Are those converted?
Not yet. The converter currently handles word-processing documents. Spreadsheets, databases, and drawings from the suite are detected — so you’ll know what a mystery file is — but their conversion isn’t available yet.