As the problem file was a word processing document, I would be content if I could just recover the text. To do so, I gave BareBones' a try. From the Enable menu of the application's Open dialog, I selected the Everything option. I could now open the AppleWorks file in TextWrangler. Heaps of unwanted code appeared before and after the actual text. But it was a simple matter to select the desired text and paste it into a blank Pages document. My salvage operation was a success.

I had a similar failure with some very old (circa 1996) Microsoft Word files. Normally, older Word files directly open in the latest version of Word. However, as with my very old AppleWorks files, these Word files apparently were too old for Word for Mac 2011 to handle. When I double-clicked the document icon in the Finder, an error popped up that said: "[File name] uses a file type that is blocked from opening in this version."

Following the advice in the message, I next tried opening the file via Word's Open dialog. The file did open, but showed a lot of nonsense characters.

Not ready to give up, I tried a work-around covered in a . I selected "Recover Text from Any File" from the Enable menu in the Open dialog. When I now chose to open the file, the document's text showed up intact. A list of fonts was appended to the end of the desired text, but this was easily deleted. I was now good to go.