Can you help with an Appleworks question?

December 5, 2009 6:15 PM

For the last few years I have been using a spreadsheet in Appleworks . I am currently using appleworks 6 and for some reason now I cannot paste data into a field without getting an error message and any attempt to do a find in the document gives me a "could not find message" Anyone have any idea what is up?
posted by citybuddha to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

Either you've got something funky (and invisible) in your clipboard, or the OS is in some wacky state of character set or stuck control key or something. Did you try a reboot?
posted by intermod at 8:19 PM on December 5, 2009

before you do anything, make a copy of the document....

reboot, repair permissions, do the usual....
posted by HuronBob at 8:14 AM on December 6, 2009

Appleworks documents can become corrupt. Back in the day I worked for Claris as a tech support agent, and supported ClarisWorks. ClarisWorks was the precursor to AppleWorks, and although the code was eventually rewritten, they have a lot in common. Once an AppleWorks or ClarisWork's document becomes corrupt, they can never really be trusted; there's no way to repair a corrupt AW/CW document. Usually, a corrupt document won't open, but sometimes they behave as you describe.

If it's the data you need, you can save it out as TAB or some other generic format. It's also possible to try importing it into Excel, although I just tried this with Excel 2008 and AW 6.2.9 and got a "Translator not found" error, so this may be a dead end. Hmmm. looks like AW will save as earlier versions of Excel, so that's something else to try -- exporting and reimporting. But I still think the document is probably corrupt in some way, and that may not be something you can fix.
posted by mosk at 10:00 AM on December 6, 2009