Open old Lotus and Quattro Pro files in XLSX 1

[transmissiontowers]

My company migrated to Office 2007 with Excel 2007. I have some old spreadsheets with the extensions WB1, WQ1, and WK1 from old versions of Quattro Pro and Lotus IIRC. I asked our IT dept if there is a converter out there and they were less than helpful saying I needed to find and install the old software and save the files in Excel format. I don't think Excel was around when I was using Lotus in the 1980's so I doubt that it had a SAVEAS function to convert to XLS format.

Is there a cheap way to convert the old WQ1 files to something Excel 2007 could open? I searched the web and found a couple that claim to do it but the trial version makes the formulas into text and numbers. I want the formulas to translate.

I also tried Open Office which someone said would do it but was not very successful. I found a Gnumeric that will open one of the formats but not the other two. Has anyone done this? As big and powerful as MS seems to be, it seems to me that they would be able to open any spreadsheet as far back as Visicalc.

TIA

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I have been called "A storehouse of worthless information" many times.

 

[IDS]

I was going to suggest Gnumeric.

The only other option I can think of is to install an old copy of Smartsuite and/or whatever the Borland Office package is called.

I just checked my copy of Smartsuite and it does have options for opening WQ1, WB1 and WB2, and should open any of the old Lotus formats.

Doug Jenkins
Interactive Design Services

http://newtonexcelbach.wordpress.com/

 

[transmissiontowers]

OOPS, I forgot to mention that my other option is to install the free trial of the Correl office package that includes the new version of Quattro Pro. Any idea if the trial is limited to the first 10 rows like one trial I got from ABC?

I'll try to look for Smartsuite around the web.

My old spreadsheets are probably just pieces of extraneous things I was doing at the time but just looking at the file names and knowing that I can't see what is in them bugs me no end. I had wrongly assumed Excel would open them forever. IIRC, Excel 2003 or the previous version (2000?) would open them because I have saved some in XLS format.

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I have been called "A storehouse of worthless information" many times.

 

[IRstuff]

Ebay has copies of Office 2000 for sale, which imports .wk?, and .wq1 files. I don't see any entries for .wb1, though...

http://shop.ebay.com/?_from=R40&_trksid=p3984.m38.l1313&_nkw=office+2000&_sacat=See-All-Categories

TTFN

FAQ731-376

 

[SteveGregory]

I use Excel 2000 and use it to open Quattro Pro (DOS) spreadsheets and save them in Excel format. See the attached file for other file types it handles.

 

[transmissiontowers]

I D/L Corel's WordPerfect Office X4 Trial Version (good for 30 days, unlimited functionality) and it will open my old spreadsheets and save them as Excel 2003 XLS files. This seems to be the cheapest solution. Someone said on another forum that MS is doing a victory dance on the other spreadsheet formats by not including the ability to open them. I wouldn't mind not being able to save in the other formats once the files were open and working, but I guess with the huge market share of Office suites that MS has, they feel they can thumb their nose at all the others.

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I have been called "A storehouse of worthless information" many times.