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Carrier
22nd Aug 2008, 19:33
I need to recover past correspondence that was on another computer and will appreciate some advice on how to do it. We used to have a Power Mac 6100/66. Our word processing was done on Clarisworks 3.0. All documents were saved in Clarisworks format. We regularly backed up the documents on to ten floppies using the back up facility of Norton Utilities for Macintosh. We disposed of the 6100/66 but still have the floppies with the saved documents. I have a USB floppy drive that came with a Toshiba laptop.

We recently bought an iMac and would like to access some of the documents from the floppies. How do we do this? I have a copy of Clarisworks 4.0 which should be able to open and read the documents once they are on our new iMac. I also have a copy of NUM 3.5 with which I hoped to be able to recover the documents from the floppy and move them on to the iMac. However, when I inserted the CD I was advised that Classic is not supported by the iMac. It seems there is no backwards compatibility with older software. We have iWork on the iMac but I wonder if this also has no backwards compatibility and will not open Clarisworks documents.

How may I recover the backed up documents from the floppies and have them available for use on the iMac?

AppleMacster
23rd Aug 2008, 18:20
Carrier,

ClarisWorks 5.0 became AppleWorks which was later succeeded by iWork. iWork will open all AppleWorks documents except databases. Appleworks should work on your new iMac. The only problem is that it has been discontinued. Your first port of call should be to try and open the documents in iWork.

Apple - Support - AppleWorks - FAQ (http://www.apple.com/support/appleworks/faq/)

Are you able to get the files off the floppy and onto your iMac's hard drive? Instead of double-clicking the file, which will make the computer try to open your copy of ClarisWorks, try opening the ClarisWorks file from within iWork.

Failing that, the last version of AppleWorks should do the trick, which can then save the files as iWork files or .doc for use in Microsoft Word.

AppleMacster