How to move MS Word documents to Pages.

I have some Word .doc documents here that were created in the mid-90's and Pages want's nothing to do with them — too old. I opened them in LibreOffice (Writer), and resaved as Word .docx, and afterward, Pages had no issue with opening them. I think it is a good idea to have LibreOffice installed, if for no other reason than its tool worthiness. It is free, 64-bit, and will open almost anything. At the time of this post, LibreOffice v6.4.2 is current, and compatible with Catalina.

LibreOffice will install everything into one application file in your Applications folder. It is an MS Office clone and superset.

You can open the Word and Excel doucments in Pages v8.2.1, or Numbers v6.2.1, however…

Pages and Numbers applications are not clones of Word and Excel, and there are features that you may have used in those Microsoft documents that Pages and Numbers cannot process, nor do Apple's applications represent feature parity with Word or Excel. This is because you are not opening these documents in their native document format, but rather asking Pages and Numbers to translate them into the respective Apple document formats without altering the original documents.

Apple does not guarantee that translation process will be accurate, and where Apple's applications do not support functionality in those Microsoft documents, it will be excluded, missing fonts substituted, and worst case, refuse to open the documents altogether.

You may or may not be happy with the translation result. If you are sharing those Word and Excel documents with others still using MS Office, there is no guarantee that the exported Pages or Numbers content will be translated properly again. Do not store your Pages and Numbers documents on Microsoft's One Drive, or Google Drive.

The document I want to move shows up on documents as unaccessible (not black, but faded) so I guess this document is no longer useable unless I want to buy Word. I hoped to use this document in Pages and migrate away from using any Microsoft products. How do I get this document over to Pages with the ability to edit it once moved?

Very Good, thanks for this

Actually I have been also been thinking about this since I bought my new imac because am new on it, I have not used it before and it's just different. I need the same help as you do. Thanks

It seems that pages will open rtfd docs if the doc is suitable (whatever that means). I can't generalize. I have a 70 page pages doc with many equations. I exported it to rtfd format. Pages would not read this doc - it tries but bogs down. Maybe if I waited 5 minutes (or more) it would complete.

In any event, I shortened the rtfd doc to about 10 pages and removed the TOC from rtfd doc and pages read it, equations and all. I'm just saying what I did, but this obviously is not general. One thing: all paragraph headings became body* fields - ie, body with larger font and bold in my case but not headings.

Presumably Word can export to rtfd, so you could try this path. Perhaps you could post your result.

This doesn't really belong in this particular thread as the original poster was asking for help in moving Word and Excel files to Pages — not dealing with RTFD files. You should have started a new post and topic for this content.

RTFD is an Apple anachronism. It is just a folder containing any images, equations as PDF, and the text contents in TXT.rtf — with a special bundle bit that tricks Finder into believing the folder is a file. I know LibreOffice Writer won't support it, and likely not Word either, though I have no version of Word available here to confirm that premise.

Pages probably does not expect a TOC in an RTFD document, and as I am just a fellow user, cannot clarify what is going on inside the Pages code that processes RTFD files.

No problem VikingOSX, as I was original poster and have absolutely no idea what rtfs documents are! Just trying to simply move an old Word doc to Pages. At 74 all the tech stuff he/she is talking about is way above my “pay grade”. Thank you for your earlier post re: activating Pages,etc.

From the standpoint of moving old Word documents to Pages, you won't need to know anything about the RTF/RTFD acronyms. As I have posted beforehand, if those Word documents are too old for Pages to open, you can open them in LibreOffice Writer, and resave them as Word 2007 - now, which in updated .docx format documents, Pages should just open them.

Microsoft implemented RTF (rich text format) with the release of Word 3.0 in 1987. They revised the format through 2008, when it was last updated. NeXT created the RTFD (rich text format directory) format for TextEdit as implemented in the NeXTSTEP operating system, and is still used today in either RTF or RTFD formats in TextEdit on macOS.

There are some useful links to Pages, Numbers, and Keynote support web pages and user guides in this post from earlier today.