Our high school has apparently started using iWorks for documents, and in particular the Pages word processor and layout tool. We were unable to open a .pages file at home using Microsoft Word and other programs. A quick search on the internet provided a helpful solution: export the file in Word format from the Pages program. So that will work next time – but didn’t help for the file on hand.
So the trick is to move the file to a PC, then add .zip on the end of the file name. Then double click to open the file, and there should be several files, including
- Thumbnail.jpg
- Preview.pdf
- index.xml
These files can then be extracted. Thumbnail.jpg shows what the document looks like. Preview.pdf provides the document in Adobe PDF format. From there, you can simply select the text, then copy and paste it into Word, or any other editing program.
Thanks to Experts Exchange for the tip.
This tip actually works on the mac too. Just add the .zip suffix and find the Preview.pdf file. Thanks for the tip.
Perfect! Saved my but! Did a project on a friends mac and the .doc file it saved went corrupt. Luckily I saved the .pages file just to be safe! Copied the text from the .pdf and just had to reformat stuff, but better than writing the whole essay again! 🙂