A lifetime ago, my computer only had Wordpad (RIP 2025) as a text editor. It was fine for basic things, but when I had the chance to get Microsoft Works, I jumped on it. From that point on, I felt like a real professional using Works. I wrote all my terrible teenage poetry and story ideas in Works. Years later, I came across the files, however, I was unable to open them. Works had long been surpassed and basically disappeared from the internet and all human consciousness it seemed.
I tried to bring some of these files into Microsoft Word, but that only worked on a few files, as the encoding on most of them was pretty goofy. Even viewing the files in a hex editor was either incredibly time-consuming or completely fruitless. I resigned and just left the files on an old hard drive to rot to magnetic equilibrium with the countless other data I hoard, forever to be an uncheckable box on my bucket list.
Recently, I came across the old hard drive and was determined to read those terrible poems. So I went to my much-loved word processor, Libreoffice, to see if they could be saved. Almost like magic, I was able to open a couple of the files!!! It worked! Opening the files one by one, then saving them, would take forever. (I had a lot of bad poetry…) So I cracked open the ol’e Google machine and found a reddit post that made my day. I run Libreoffice Portable, so I couldn’t just use the commands in that post. I had to find the actual “soffice” executable.
No worries, I just poked around until I found it deep down in the LibreOffice Portable folder. Now to convert all my old tomes of terrible teenage tradition, all I had to do is:
- Visit the folder in my file explorer
- Right-click and open a command line there
- Recite the magic words:
C:\Users\username\Installations\LibreOfficePortablePrevious\App\libreoffice\program\soffice.com –convert-to doc *wps
- Then spin around twice and cross my fingers as I press “Enter” and…
Huzzah! All of the files are converted to .doc in one fell swoop.
Now I can spend the rest of the evening firmly rooted in the deepest of cringe. Bonus! I found some of my wife’s old teenage writing as well, haha. I’ll have to save those for a rainy day 🙂