A “fun” project I took upon myself was to convert all of the old WordPerfect files I had on my Mac. I’ve been pretty careful about keeping everything I’ve ever written, and that includes papers from college. I had WordPerfect back then, and I sorely missed it when it was gone. (My master’s degree thesis was written in Microsoft Word, and a great many of my psychological reports were, too, until I decided to change things up and move to LaTeX and Nisus Writer Pro).

These old files presented themselves in the Finder as Unix Executable files; they were created back in the day when file extensions on the Mac were verboten. (Smug Mac users from this era surely remember gloating about this affordance.) I used A Better Finder Rename to add the .wpd file extension to all such files on my Mac. This would prove to be painting with too broad a brush… or smashing with too large a hammer. Not all of these files were WordPerfect docs (many were html, text, and saved emails). The most egregious overuse of ABFR was renaming three unix files in Blizzazrd’s Battle.net application–which I have yet to launch to see if I adequately repaired.

Renaming the files wasn’t enough, because none of the apps (not even Nisus Writer Pro) on my Mac would open the .wpd files. I looked into some solutions, including Pandoc, but I found WP Converter on the Mac App Store for five bucks. Sold.

I learned by trying to drop some of my converted files into WPD Converter that they were not, in fact, WordPerfect files. Maddenly, WPD Converter doesn’t report this to you; dragging the file into the conversion window just yields and empty menu, with no error message. If you’re dragging a file or two over, you might notice this omission, but if you are pulling two dozen files in, you might not.

I went with .rtf for most of the WordPerfect conversions. Once I realized that I was dealing with all manner of other legacy files, I just had to slog through each folder, removinng the .wpd extentsion I’d added and seeing what application would correctly (or approximately) open the file. I added .txt, .html, and .eml and most of the time had a useful file. I converted a few things to PDF as well. The packrat in me kept the old WordPerfect files, for what reason I don’t know.

Some fun finds:

• A assignment for my Education 202 class, which were lesson lesson plans on checking email for a class called “Introduction to Computer Networking.”
• Another sizzler: “Pavlovian Conditioning and Extinction Trials in Simulated Dogs.”
• Concert tickets for “MTV Presents the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Wspec.Guest Foo Fighters, Entertainment Cntr,Camden, Rain Or Shine*no Refexch, Tue Jul 11, 2000 7:00pm
• Invocations to get a frames-capable browser

What I didn’t expect was how much of a Swiss Army knife LibreOffice would become; this is the only word processor I had that would open up just about anything I threw at it. I could have easily converted all of the files using just LibreOffice, but that one-by-one processing of files is for the birds. It really is quite an accomplishment, though, and that team should be proud of themselves.