If you are a former AppleWorks user, you probably know that AppleWorks no longer launches in OS X 10.7 Lion. This is because AppleWorks requires and Lion no longer supports Rosetta.

The simplest solution is to get (Pages, Numbers, and Keynote). With these apps, you can open most word processing documents, spreadsheets, and presentations originally created with AppleWorks. After installing iWork apps and removing AppleWorks from your drive, AppleWorks documents will often open simply by double-clicking the document icon in the Finder. If not, launch the relevant iWork app (such as Pages for word processing documents) and select the desired document from the app's Open dialog.

One place where I found this did not succeed was with documents created using AppleWorks Draw module. I assume this is because no iWork app directly corresponds to the Draw module. Fortunately, third-party apps come to the rescue here. To find out if I owned one of these apps, I selected Open With from the contextual menu of a reluctant AppleWorks file. A likely compatible app showed up in the list: . I selected the app and, just as I had hoped, the file opened.

My work was not quite done. Tucked away in a cobwebbed corner of my hard drive, I found some truly ancient AppleWorks documents. These files, dating back to the 1990's, were so old that my iWork apps refused to open them. When I tried, I got an error that said: "Import Error. This document was created with an unsupported version of AppleWorks."