Open a MORE outline
MORE files are among the trickier survivors of the classic Mac era: they were part outline, part presentation, and they open in nothing made this century. If you’ve found them in a late relative’s business files or your own archived floppies — meeting notes, project plans, the skeleton of a book — this tool will get the words back. Drop a file in and the converter reads it right in your browser, producing a .odt document for Word, LibreOffice, or Pages, plain text, or an immediate preview. The engine is a ~2MB download on first use and runs entirely on your machine, offline if need be. Your file is never uploaded and never altered, so the original stays pristine while you work out what’s inside it.
About MORE
MORE was the crown jewel of the golden age of Mac outliners. It came from Living Videotext, the company founded by Dave Winer — later a pioneer of blogging and RSS — as the successor to his groundbreaking ThinkTank. Released in 1986, MORE took the outliner somewhere new: the same document could be viewed as a collapsible outline, a bullet chart for presentations, or a tree chart showing the whole structure at a glance. In an era before PowerPoint dominated, plenty of business presentations were MORE outlines projected from a Mac. The program won MacUser’s Best Product award, and when Living Videotext merged into Symantec in 1987, development continued through the well-regarded MORE 3.x releases. Symantec eventually wound the product down in the early 1990s, leaving thousands of meticulously structured documents behind in an undocumented format. The Document Liberation Project’s libmwaw library — the same filter set LibreOffice uses — now reads those files, and it’s what powers the converter on this page.
Frequently asked questions
Is anything from my file stored on your servers?
Nothing, because your file never reaches a server. The conversion runs entirely in your browser using WebAssembly. We couldn’t look at your documents if we wanted to — they stay on your computer the whole time.
The files have no extension — do I need to rename them first?
No renaming needed. The converter identifies MORE files by their internal structure, so extensions are irrelevant. Files inside BinHex (.hqx) wrappers from old downloads and archives are recognized too.
Will the converted file open in Microsoft Word?
Yes. The .odt output opens in Word, LibreOffice, and Apple Pages, with formatting preserved wherever it can be recovered from the original.
MORE had bullet charts and tree charts. Do those come back?
Honestly, no — the slide and tree-chart visuals were rendered views inside the app, and they aren’t recovered. What you do get is everything that mattered underneath them: the full text and its outline organization, converted as structured, indented content in the .odt file.