Open Pocket Word .psw files from an old PDA
Old PDA backups have a way of resurfacing — a Pocket PC in a drawer, an ActiveSync folder on a retired laptop — and inside them, .psw files that nothing modern will open. Pocket Word was the pared-down word processor on Windows CE and Pocket PC handhelds, and the notes, journals, and drafts written on those little screens were saved in its own format. This page reads .psw files directly in your browser and hands back a preview, a modern .odt (which opens in Word, LibreOffice, and Pages), or plain text. Nothing is uploaded anywhere: the converter is a small engine, about 2MB on first load, that runs entirely on your machine, keeps working offline, and never modifies the original file. If the words survived twenty years in a backup folder, getting them back should be the easy part.
About Pocket Word (.psw)
Pocket Word arrived with Windows CE in 1996 and rode the whole PDA wave: first the Handheld PCs with their tiny keyboards, then the stylus-driven Pocket PCs — Compaq iPAQs, HP Jornadas, Dell Axims — that professionals carried in the years before smartphones absorbed everything. You wrote on the device in Pocket Word’s stripped-down format, and ActiveSync converted documents back and forth with desktop Word whenever the device sat in its cradle. But files that only ever lived on the handheld — or in sync folders, memory cards, and backups — stayed .psw. Microsoft retired Pocket Word as Windows Mobile gave way to newer platforms around 2007, and desktop Word never learned to read the format on its own, so those files have been orphaned ever since. libwps, the Document Liberation Project library that also powers LibreOffice’s filters for this family of formats, reads .psw directly; it’s the engine behind this page.
Frequently asked questions
Are my documents kept private?
Completely. The conversion runs inside your browser using a local WebAssembly engine — your .psw file is never uploaded, and no server ever sees its contents. There’s no account and no history kept anywhere. After the first ~2MB load, the tool works with your internet connection switched off.
I’m not sure which files in the backup are Pocket Word documents. Does the extension matter?
No — the converter identifies each file by reading its contents, so extensions can be missing, wrong, or mangled by the backup software. Drop any candidate file in and the tool will tell you what it is. If it’s a supported word-processing format, you’ll see the text immediately.
What format do I get back, and how much formatting survives?
You get an on-screen preview plus downloads as .odt — which opens in modern Word, LibreOffice, and Pages — or plain text. Pocket Word supported only simple formatting to begin with, so documents typically come through looking very much as they did on the device. Whatever can’t be recovered as formatting still arrives as complete text.
My .psw files came from an old device backup or ActiveSync folder. Will they still open?
Usually, yes. Files copied off a memory card, pulled from a backup, or left in a sync folder are ordinary files — age and an odd location don’t hurt them. As long as the file itself wasn’t truncated or corrupted when it was copied, the converter reads it like any other .psw. If a file was synced to the desktop, note that ActiveSync sometimes converted it to a .doc on the way — those are worth trying here too.