Before Word took over, a Mac document was usually written in MacWrite, the word processor that shipped with the first Macintosh in 1984, or in one of its rivals: MacWrite II and Pro, WriteNow, Nisus Writer, FullWrite, Word for Mac 1 to 5, or SimpleText for notes. Their files, often with no extension at all, survive on old floppy disks, CDs and backups, and no current program on a Mac or PC opens them.
This page reads them with libmwaw, the open-source reader LibreOffice uses for old Mac files, compiled to run in your browser, and shows the document with its fonts, styles, tables, footnotes and pictures. Save it as a Word file to keep working on it, as a PDF to print or archive, or as plain text. The file is never uploaded. It is free to use, with no account and no upload limit, and it runs entirely in your browser: nothing is uploaded, and while the page stays open, a feature you have already used keeps working offline.
- How do I convert a MacWrite file to Word?
- Open it here and choose Save as Word (.docx). The text keeps its fonts, sizes, styles, alignment, tables and pictures, and opens in Word, Pages, Google Docs and LibreOffice.
- Can I open old Word for Mac files here?
- Yes, from Word 1 for the Mac (1985) to Word 5.1. Word 6 for Mac and later wrote the same format as Word for Windows, which the DOC Viewer opens.
- Which programs' documents does it read?
- MacWrite, MacWrite II and Pro, Word for Mac 1 to 5, WriteNow, Nisus Writer, FullWrite, MindWrite, Mariner Write, LightWayText, Tex-Edit, SimpleText and TeachText, DOCMaker, eDOC, MacDoc, Acta, More, RagTime, HanMac Word and others: some fifty classic Mac programs in all, the same ones LibreOffice opens.
- Why is a picture missing from my old Mac document?
- Pictures inside a document are drawn from Apple's old PICT format. A file copied from a Mac to Windows or Linux, or through email, may have lost the hidden part of the file (its resource fork) where some programs kept pictures and styles; the text still opens. A BinHex (.hqx) or MacBinary copy keeps that part.
- Is my old Mac document uploaded anywhere?
- No. It is read and shown in your browser by a copy of the reader served from this site.