Dracoro

Hi

I have been sent an iWork document (numbers I think) and need to be able to convert to something readable in windows.

Can this be done?

n.b. Without asking creator of doc to export to windows format and without using someone else who has a mac to hand! i.e. I'd like to do this if & when I ever get these sort of docs sent to me.

Markus

I've had a very quick search and cannot find any convertor for iWork documents to, for example, Excel format (as it's a number's file).

I'm just downloading iWork 08 and will save out a numbers file and see if Office 2008 will open it, or if there is some other way to convert it.

Markus

A little update for you. I've created a test file in Numbers 08. It seems that the saved "file" isn't a file, it's a package, and contains various things, including a .gz file that contains what I presume is the actual data. Looks like it's xml, but Excel won't parse it and only lets you open it as text.

So far I've not found any way of getting the numbers file opened on a PC. The only solution I can see is to get the original sender to export the file from Numbers as an excel file, which obviously goes against what you want them to do.

Dracoro

thanks Markus.

any ideas/updates on this?

Even being able to read the XML part would be useful, I can do something with that then.

Markus

Well, the .numbers file looks like a package on my setup, and I think on windows it would probably show up as a folder, in which case inside there should be an index.xml.gz which if you un-gzip you'll get an index.xml file, which you can then open and try and find the data.

Looking at my test file, if you do a search for sf:col="1" sf:row="1" you will end up finding the start entry for what would be A1 in an Excel file.
Then look along the line and, as per my example file, you'll find something like this:

<sf:cell-text sfa:string="testing"/></sf:text-cell>

The string= bit actually being the data in the cell.

It seems other cells follow the same format with the data, so if you were to look for the row and col items and then the sfa:string item you should be able to get the data out.

Bear in mind the above was with a text string in the field, I've no idea what it would do with a calculation, but given the somewhat simplistic layout of the actual data strings, I suspect it would be somewhat human readable.

I hope this helps

Worst case, email me the file and I'll save it out as Excel for you.