Tips on how to open old ClarisWorks and MS Word files?

[Todd's keyboard]

I've recovered some old ClarisWorks and and MS Word documents that I wrote in 1989 through the early '90s. They are mostly text, with a little bit of information cut and pasted in from a Hypercard data base embedded in each file.

While I can open the files, there are lots of gibberish characters and the sequence of the text is not in order. I've tried using MS Word 2004, Open Office, and Text-Edit Plus.

Any thoughts on how I might be able to open these files in a more readable format?

thanks, Todd's jumbled keyboard

[freeradical]

BBEdit

Zap Gremlins...

[JPK]

Depending on how old, Pages may open some of them.

JPK

[colonel panic]

I used recently used Pages to open some old Appleworks documents with no issues, don't know about Claris.

I still remember buying ClarisWorks at a brick and mortar computer store in Harvard Square. Ah, nostalgia.

[what4]

Same problem here, with what I think is a Word 5 file. BBEdit is no help because the text is in code. Can't open with any version of Word that I have, WP, InDesign, Textedit, etc. etc.

[freeradical]

With files of that age, there might also be file compression issues , since back then hard drives were still quite expensive.

I seem to recall using Stacker?

[Zoidberg]

A long time back, I used FileJuicer to pull text from an old word processing file -- was it WriteNow? Something like that. I had to do a lot to make the text usable again, but the client was paying the tab, so there you go.

[Fritz]

if you have access to an old XP machine, the MS stuff might squeeze as an export.
might....

or AW on an old PPC or early Xeon.
My 1st gen Xeon still does AW files.

[ka jowct]

Do you have access to an older version of Word? I think I have the version before X, on at least one machine. Maybe something of that era could open them.

[Rolando]

I have an image of my old iMac G3's hard drive that I can access (including apps) with Sheepsaver!