Mac file to PC file conversion help?

January 28, 2010 11:11 AM

Is there a way to open .pages (iWorks) files in Word 2007 which doesn't involve going back to the original sender to get them to export the file?

I know if I rename the file to .zip I can extract the contents and get a PDF file and an XML file... but the PDF isn't editable and the XML comes up with a bunch of markup, of course.

What's the simplest fix here?

posted by Zinger to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

The simplest way is to have the sender resend it as a .docx file. There really isn't another way.
posted by birdherder at 11:15 AM on January 28, 2010

This will convert to text...
posted by jckll at 11:25 AM on January 28, 2010

I asked this question a few months ago and the .zip trick was the only one. I tried to find something about opening xml docs in 2007 on Microsoft's website but it's crashed my Firefox twice already. Maybe this will help?
posted by amethysts at 11:29 AM on January 28, 2010

I use the advice here on quite a regular basis, it's the .zip theory and works fine.
posted by ellieBOA at 11:40 AM on January 28, 2010

Response by poster: Is there any quick way to strip the xml markup out of the thing? Without the Pages convertor?
posted by Zinger at 11:51 AM on January 28, 2010

Response by poster: I should clarify a bit here - I'm not against using the convertor mentioned above personally, but I can foresee a need here where I work to convert pages files to doc frequently and so I'm trying to find a process that is as easy and non-techie friendly as possible.
posted by Zinger at 11:53 AM on January 28, 2010

You would need to develop some kind of XSLT translator. I just tried stripping the XML out of a Pages doc, and the output was not really useful. No line breaks, footnotes stuck at the beginning of the text, and a lot of Lorem Ipsum mysteriously prepended to the whole thing.
posted by adamrice at 12:22 PM on January 28, 2010

Best answer: If you find yourself needing to convert on a regular basis, and you can't convince the sender to send the file in Word format, then you need to have access to a running copy of Pages. Perhaps you could run OS X in a virtualization program such as VMWare.
posted by twblalock at 1:43 AM on January 29, 2010