What is the correct or best OpenOffice word processor conversion filter for .WPS files--files created by the Microsoft Works word processor? I do not know the release number of this version of Works, but I remember buying and using it to write these files starting circa 1998, certainly the late nineties. If I can't make OpenOffice read these files, I will have to go to eBay and try to find a secondhand copy of Works (in which case I would expect a newer release to work, because I assume even Microsoft isn't dumb enough to make Works incompatible with older versions of itself.)

I do not think there is a filter to read these files, but one can always;

Visit: http://blog.zamzar.com/2007/04/23/co...t-txt-and-pdf/

I *think* you can read works files into word, and you could then save them off as .doc files, which OO does read.

Just a thought...

Yes, but the main reason I use OO is I don't own Word.

I have located a command-line routine called wps2odt that will convert MS Works .wps files to .odt format, compatible with Openoffice.org.2. Usage:

wps2odt sourcefile.wps targetfile.odt

Three components are needed to build wps2odt: libwpd-0.9, libwps, and wps2odt.

libwpd is a WordPerfect conversion library that must be installed before any of the other stuff will build. The necessary version, libwpd-0.9, has not been released, but its source code is available from the developer's cvs tree under the guise of libwpd2.

I believe most modern Linux distributions have cvs and svn clients available. From the terminal, entering the command (all on one line),

cvs -z3 -dserver:anonymous@libwpd.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/libwpd co -P libwpd2

produced a copy of the source code in my working directory. The command worked without any special authorization.

The code for libwps and wps2odt is available from the developer's svn tree. The command (all on one line),

svn co https://libwps.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/libwps/trunk libwps

produced copies of the code for both items in my working directory. If the svn client complains about an obsolete SSL certificate or some such thing, just temporarily accept the connection.

On the local machine, the source code for the three builds should now reside in

libwpd2
libwps/trunk/libwps
libwps/trunk/wps2odt

The embedded instructions state that in each of these directories one can simply run (as root)

./configure
make
make install

But of course one must first run ./autogen.sh to produce the configure scripts.

And after the configure scripts are created, it's not a bad idea to run ./configure -h to check out any nice compile-time options that might be available. I used some of these options to bring file locations into conformity with my Slackware distribution.

The Makefiles created by configure recognize the DESTDIR directive, so it is also not a bad idea, instead of simply running make install, to do a dry run with
make DESTDIR=/SomeTemporaryDirectory install
This permits examining the final file structure to ensure that stuff will actually go where expected.

Links:

http://libwps.sourceforge.net/
http://sourceforge.net/svn/?group_id=176121
http://libwpd.sourceforge.net/
http://libwpd.sourceforge.net/development.html
http://sourceforge.net/cvs/?group_id=62662

Tim

1 members found this post helpful.

The version of works I had to deal with was on Windows 3.11 and the newer converters even from MS did not work on the files. I had to open each one in it's original version of works then save them in .rtf format so they could be opened by other programs..

I don't know if that solution tmunro posted would have worked on them or not..

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/d...displaylang=en

'Compatability & ease of use !', isn't that Microsofts newest tag-line ?

proprietary formats blow..

I've been testing wsp2odt with documents produced by both MS Works 3.0 (on win3.1) and MS Works 5.0 (on win98). The results have generally been pretty good but not always perfect.

The program doesn't seem to follow font changes within a document very well, for instance. I have many old math papers that were written mainly in Times New Roman font but are peppered with special characters from other fonts. If I convert such a document, I must go through it and manually tweak the font settings and other minor bobbles. A bit of a pain, I admit, but the point is that I can at least get into the document to fix it without booting into my win98 partition.

Of somewhat greater concern is that the program seems to ignore embedded images. This is occasionally a blessing. While the program disregards all my carefully contrived diagrams and plots, it cheerfully converts files that MS Works refuses to convert to rtf or refuses to open at all. I suspect these problem files contain dynamic links to long-dead objects, and Works, rather than ignoring the links, simply crashes.

Here is my experience with the other usual recommendations:

MS Works on wine: Works would not install on a non-windows platform, of course. But after copying the installed program files as well as most of my windows dll's and registry over to the wine directory, I finally had a program that would at least open. Unfortunately it would crash before it could do anything useful (like opening a document, for instance).

word2x => latex2rtf: I located the source code for word2x and after some tweaking got it to compile. latex2rtf compiled without a hitch. I tried running wps files through the resulting contraption but got only broken, partial paragraphs out. word2x was never intended to handle MS Works files, but it probably handles MS Word documents well enough.

As I understand it, wps2odt is an artifact of an on-going project to build a wps import filter for OpenOffice.org. It is very much a work in progress, but at least it is progress in the right direction.

Tim

I truly appreciate the help, but could you phrase it in non-techie terms for someone who just wants to read a file and can't really follow the jargon you've laid out? What do I do? I've got this .wps file that I can't read in Open Office. I don't have Microsoft Works. I respect your knowledge but I don't know how to use it. Thanks much.

What I probably should have said is that, after many days of scouring the Internet, I finally located enough information and necessary bits and pieces to put together a converter for .wps files that would run on a Linux/Unix computer. I didn't mean to imply that I had discovered a ready-made program.

Unfortunately I know of no other way to convert these files without MS Works than to build the conversion program from scratch. But it gets worse. This is not a stand-alone program: it requires that certain other obscure support programs called libraries also be built and installed before it can be built and used. Clearly a project like this is a technical undertaking, and my choice of vocabulary reflects this, as I assumed that only technical people would attempt it. Jargon is a useful abbreviated form of communication among members of a group but (sadly) is also used to intimidate and exclude perceived outsiders, which was never my intention.

I sense a fair amount of desperation out there for some way to open .wps files in a non-Microsoft environment, and I wish there were a readily available, nontechnical way of accomplishing this. On the bright side though, it does seem that there are plans afoot to incorporate a means of importing these files into some future release of OpenOffice.org. It was the very site maintained by those working on this, libwps.sourceforge.net, that pointed me towards a solution, ugly as it is.

Tim

It is possible to use a hex editor say khexedit
then do a replace ff with nothing and 00 with nothing
after that the text portion of the wps file should stand out
save as a Temp.txt then open in text editor and remove the other formating
garbage. Hope this helps till Native OO conversion.

Seems to work.

Chunks of text came up out of sequence, but nothing a little cut and paste wouldn't fix.

Tim

Today in january 2009, customized version of openoffice.org-3.0 donlowded from this
site (supported by Novell members ?)
http://go-oo.org/
support natively Works files (*.wps), expecting a soon integration in standard OpenOffice branch.

Interesting..

so according to their site Debian and Ubuntu OO.o are already built using go-oo as the base....