MS Works Suite to Excel Converter

[TechDave]

I am in the process of building a brand new machine for a customer of mine and on her old machine (Dell Dimension/PIII/700MHz) she had MSWorks Suite 2000 and compiled a bunch of spreadsheets (and other files) that all have the .wks file extension. On her new machine, I feel sure she'll want MS Office for XP instead of the Suite.

I put her hard drive in my machine and brought these files to a folder on my desktop. When I try to open any of these .wks files with MS Excel on my machine, it gives me the following error message:



My question is this, is there a program that can convert these .wks files so that they can be read in MS Office (or more importantly MS Excel)? Or is it a plug-in for office that I need to download? Or is it a conversion wizard that I should be running the files through when I bring them into Excel?

Thanks in advance for any and all help!
TD

[Miz]

From this Microsoft page:

Excel 2000 or later versions cannot directly open files created in Microsoft Works version 3.0 or later. To open a Works file in Excel, first open it in Works and use the Save As command to convert it to one of the file formats listed below. Then close the Works file and open the converted version in Excel.
* Works for Windows 2.0/Works for DOS SS
* Excel SS
* Lotus 1-2-3

That's the easiest way. For third part conversion utilities, do a Google search for "convert wks to xls" and you'll get lots of links to investigate.

[TechDave]

Thanks for the reply Miz! Yeah, I found basically the same thing on this page.

Looks like what I'll have to do is load MS Suite back onto her new computer once I get it built, install her old hard drive as a slave drive, and go through all her files she created in Works Suite. I'll have to open each one and save it in the proper format (.xls) uninstall Works Suite and then install MS Office. I should then be able to open her old MS Works Suite files in MS Office.

I wished the process were a little easier but if that's how it must be done.....oh well!

If anyone out there knows of an easier way to do this, please chime in!

Thanks again Miz!

TD