What is the easiest way to open a Mac Pages (.pages) file on Windows?

I have moved to OS X, and although Microsoft's Office software is brilliant on Windows, on the Mac its usability leaves something to be desired compared to Apple's own counterparts (Pages, Numbers and Keynote) which, although not containing as many bells and whistles, still provide any features I need to use. So I now open all my existing .docx files in Pages (which can open it natively), where, once saved in the application, saves it to a .pages file by default. What is the easiest way then, to open .pages files on my Windows computers (ideally, a similar automatic process in the reverse)? Is there a downloadable Microsoft Word add-on (like the one that opens and converts newer versions of office files than the version you have installed), or a third party Office add-on (whether free or paid), or some other nifty tool to one-click / auto-convert .pages files to .docx files in Windows?

asked Jun 27, 2014 at 2:54 user78017 user78017

I'm afraid not. Your only solution is to save the document in a portable format (like ODF). You may be able to find a document converter like Pandoc that supports such a conversion. But, to my knowledge, to such tool exists.

Commented Jun 27, 2014 at 4:03

We have this all the time where I work (a University) and we have to inform our students to do a "Save As. " in Pages to an Office format. If you're going to be opening Pages files in Office on a regular basis I would change the default Pages format so all new documents are Office compatible. On a side note: if you open a .pages file in, say, 7-Zip, there will be a PDF of your document that can have text highlighted then copy/pasted into other applications.

Commented Jun 27, 2014 at 6:38

Yeah about the PDF 'Quick View' document in the folder of the ZIP-renamed .pages file thing - I don't know what makes the difference, but my Pages files don't have a PDF, but only (useless) JPEGs - see here. It would definitely help things if there was some setting in Pages that changed that (I'm just using the latest version updated in Mavericks, whatever it is), but it seems that trick isn't useful (anymore?). if it were, one could pretty much write a vb script/.bat etc. to automate probably quite a lot of the needed conversion/extraction.