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USAO Computer Services & Support How to open ".wpd"
(Corel WordPerfect) documents on your Mac: OR Jump straight to the procedure ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- If you're a Mac user and you've ever received a document in .wpd (WordPerfect) format, then you'll be familiar with the frustration of trying to open that document with your word processing software package. Even the ever powerful Microsoft Word can't suitably open up .wpd files on your Mac. Imagine the following scenario: a client/friend just sent you a batch of documents to read/review. And your heart sinks as you see that procession of “.wpd” file extensions. Ugh: WordPerfect files. There was a time when WordPerfect was the champion of the word processing world. That time was well over a decade ago, though, and Microsoft Word is now the undisputed leader while WordPerfect languishes in relative obscurity. But every once in a while a WordPerfect file rears its head again. And when you try to open it in OS X, you run into trouble. Microsoft Word can barely understand it. TextEdit can’t make heads or tails of it. AppleWorks wants nothing to do with it. And don't even try to use anything from Adobe to open it. Of course if you actually had Corel WordPerfect installed on your Mac, then this would be a moot point. But then again, that's beside the point. There is no such thing as Corel WordPerfect for the Mac! At least not one for Mac OS X. Corel released version 3.5 for the Mac way back in 1996, shortly followed by the improved version 3.5e. It was never updated beyond that, and the product was eventually discontinued (for the Macintosh platform only; there is still current and up-to-date development for the Windows version of WordPerfect). As of 2004, Corel has reiterated that the company has no plans to further develop WordPerfect for Macintosh (such as creating a native Mac OS X version). Read here for more info. In any case, Microsoft Word is more or less considered the de facto word processing software package for the Mac (as well as in the Windows world) with a few close runner-ups to that title. The most irritating thing is that the Windows version of Microsoft Word has got a built-in converter for opening .wpd files but the Mac version of Microsoft Word doesn't!! That's true as of the most current version of Microsoft Word for Mac (currently version 2004 - as of this article being written). Perhaps the next version of Microsoft Office for Mac, slated for release in January of 2008, will have a built-in converter for opening .wpd files *. * [EDIT - 8/4/2008: The new version of Microsoft Office (i.e. version 2008) actually can open .wpd documents using the text convert wizard that's built-in to Microsoft Word, BUT our experiments/tests have shown that a lot of the .wpd document's original formatting is lost. However, most if not all the text is nonetheless recovered by opening the wpd file in Word 2008. So ultimately it's still not a true viable option to use even Microsoft Word 2008 as the absolute de-facto application for opening .wpd files on a Mac] Okay, so what's a Mac user to do?! There’s always the venerable file-conversion utility MacLinkPlus Deluxe… but you might be reluctant to shell out something like $80 for a program that you might very rarely need. Especially if you can solve this problem for free. So then there's the free stuff: One free utility, WPConvert, works only on older versions of the WordPerfect document format. That’s a pity, because it’s tiny and simple - two things that are most useful in a conversion utility. The winner is..........AbiWord, a full-featured FREE word processing program (here’s the official web site.) The download is about 40 MB: hefty, but not onerous by any means on a fast internet connection. AbiWord happily opens any WordPerfect file (without any loss of the document's formatting), and supports a slew of other formats (including Palm database files, of all things!). AbiWord is able to read and write all industry standard document types, such as OpenOffice documents, Microsoft Word documents, WordPerfect documents, Rich Text Format documents, HTML web pages and many more. However, it can't open Microsoft Works documents (more details below). To be fair though, AbiWord is still a pretty decent and very well rounded word processing software by itself without being just a fancy on-the-side utility for opening WordPerfect files on a Mac. It might not have every single bell and whistle that some of the big boys might have but sure enough, it's got all that you'll need and then some. The best thing about AbiWord is that once you open up your .wpd documents with it, you can then save them in Microsoft Word (.doc) format (amongst a choice of many other formats) so that they are more portable and universal. To do this, simply open up the .wpd file with AbiWord and then click on File, then click on Save As and you will have the option to save it in Microsoft Word format. So in conclusion, this is your classic textbook
"sledgehammer-to-kill-a-flea" solution, but it works flawlessly!
NOTE: Keep in mind to not
confuse ".wpd" files with ".wps" files. The .wps files are
Microsoft Works documents which can be opened
with a little bit of finagling through Microsoft Word on
any Mac (but ONLY through Microsoft Word; the current version of AbiWord
can't
open .wps documents). Once opened through Microsoft Word, there is a
relatively slight loss in formatting inside the wps document but the text
is still legible and more-or-less contextual (about 90%). Once you open the
.wps file in Microsoft Word, it will give you a small menu box with
various conversion options for your .wps document. The best option to
take is to
"Recover Text from Any File". See screenshot below:
 Once you've opened the .wps document in Microsoft Word, you can clean it up a little bit to fix any formatting guffaws left behind after the text recovery and then re-save the file as a Microsoft Word (.doc) document. * [EDIT - 8/4/2008: The new version of Microsoft Office for Mac (i.e. version 2008) will automatically open wps (Microsoft Works) documents without even manually needing to use the file-convert menu shown above]
That's it. Just that easy.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Related Content:
Opening Microsoft Office 2007 files in previous versions of Microsoft Office:
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