17

I have moved to OS X, and although Microsoft's Office software is brilliant on Windows, on the Mac its usability leaves something to be desired compared to Apple's own counterparts (Pages, Numbers and Keynote) which, although not containing as many bells and whistles, still provide any features I need to use.

So I now open all my existing .docx files in Pages (which can open it natively), where, once saved in the application, saves it to a .pages file by default.

What is the easiest way then, to open .pages files on my Windows computers (ideally, a similar automatic process in the reverse)?

Is there a downloadable Microsoft Word add-on (like the one that opens and converts newer versions of office files than the version you have installed), or a third party Office add-on (whether free or paid), or some other nifty tool to one-click / auto-convert .pages files to .docx files in Windows?

  • 2
    I'm afraid not. Your only solution is to save the document in a portable format (like ODF). You may be able to find a document converter like Pandoc that supports such a conversion. But, to my knowledge, to such tool exists. – HalosGhost Jun 27 '14 at 04:03
  • We have this all the time where I work (a University) and we have to inform our students to do a "Save As..." in Pages to an Office format. If you're going to be opening Pages files in Office on a regular basis I would change the default Pages format so all new documents are Office compatible... On a side note: if you open a .pages file in, say, 7-Zip, there will be a PDF of your document that can have text highlighted then copy/pasted into other applications. – Kinnectus Jun 27 '14 at 06:38
  • Yeah about the PDF 'Quick View' document in the folder of the ZIP-renamed .pages file thing - I don't know what makes the difference, but my Pages files don't have a PDF, but only (useless) JPEGs - see [here](http://i.imgur.com/bSh4rIx.png). It would definitely help things if there was some setting in Pages that changed that (I'm just using the latest version updated in Mavericks, whatever it is), but it seems that trick isn't useful (anymore?)...if it were, one could pretty much write a vb script/.bat etc. to automate probably quite a lot of the needed conversion/extraction... –  Jun 27 '14 at 07:54

6 Answers6

18

Open Pages files in Windows?

Use Google Docs and Cloud Converter. FANTASTIC - Just working.

  1. Open or register your Gmail account.
  2. After you have signed in, go onto Google Docs (link underneath).
  3. Upload your file to Google Docs. (it`s your private storage)
  4. Click Open with and select Cloud Converter.

Links:

karel
  • 13,390
  • 26
  • 45
  • 52
Laslo Frischmann
  • 181
  • 1
  • 3
  • 1
    One should understand that anything you upload to Google, in theory Google has access to, far to many examples of them actually using said access too. – Ramhound Oct 07 '14 at 18:45
  • Yeah you know, that IS smoother than zamzar! So it's an improvement! A small/moderate step on the way! Most people have a Google account, and that's not too hard to do if nothing else can be done! But it's still a long ways from some simple local tool or plugin or whatever, it's a real pain. –  Oct 08 '14 at 03:24
  • You should understand that Cloud Converter is a 3rd party app not opened by Google. https://cloudconvert.com/privacy https://cloudconvert.com/terms and you will be using there "free tier" account service unless you pay for a subscription. – rob Jan 14 '19 at 11:06
  • Just fyi, as of May 2019, solution still works! – AbstractVoid May 13 '19 at 22:11
4

Another option is to register for free to Apple's iCloud service (https://www.icloud.com/), upload your document there, and download it in either .docx or .pdf format. This of course less than ideal, but at least you can view the document. A more detailed step-by-step description of the process with screenshots can be found here. Unlike the previous solution based on Google Docs, in this case you need not convert the document... you can edit it online, and save it back as .pages, if you plan to work mostly in that format.

Community
  • 1
giocomai
  • 141
  • 3
2

What I just did:

  1. Save the file locally on your windows computer.
  2. Right click on the file and select rename.
  3. Remove .pages extension and enter .zip as the extension and press enter.
  4. Open the zip file and find preview.jpg

Go to http://www.onlineocr.net/ and convert image to text. This may only work for simple text docs. I my case all I wanted was the text anyway.

JaseC
  • 129
  • 3
0

In Pages under File just select Export and then choose .docx. Pages will save the file in a format that can be opened in Office on a Windows computer.

Jon Doh
  • 1
0

I was very uncomfortable granting cloud conversion tools blanket access to my Google Drive.. I found it was easiest to use a third party conversion service and upload just that one .pages file to convert. I used https://www.aconvert.com/document/pages-to-pdf/ and it worked. There's also a convert to .doc option from the same source.

Jeff Atwood
  • 23,972
  • 30
  • 99
  • 120
-1

In Windows, just add ".zip" as a filename extension and you'll be able to open in in Microsoft Office. See here for more details:

http://osxdaily.com/2014/07/16/open-pages-format-file-in-windows/

Steven Carter
  • 1
  • 2
  • 1
    Welcome to Super User. Although this may answer the question, you should give a more detailed description of the linked content and explain how it relates to the question. This will help ensure that this answer remains useful in the event the linked page is removed or goes offline. For more information, see [this Meta Stack Exchange post](http://meta.stackexchange.com/a/8259). – bwDraco Jul 19 '16 at 01:29
  • Sorry, MS Word won't open this .zip file for me--it just complained about corrupt content. The answer from @JaseC, also involving a rename to .zip, did help though. I wonder if this advice is getting out of date / works for older versions? – Charlie Joynt Feb 27 '17 at 11:14
  • yeah this totally does not work, it is a zip archive but nothing in it is really useful on Windows other than the first page preview JPG – Jeff Atwood Mar 31 '19 at 01:04