Open Pages, Numbers and Keynote files without a Mac
Someone sent you a .pages, .numbers or .key file from a Mac or an iPhone, and Windows, Android or Linux has nothing that opens it. Drop it here: you get the document's text, every slide with its speaker notes, the tables as a grid you can save as CSV, the preview picture Apple saved inside it, and every picture it holds.
The file is read on your device. It is not uploaded, and nothing in it is fetched or run.
What it shows
- Which app made it. Pages, Numbers or Keynote, told from the objects inside the file rather than from its name, and whether it is the current format (2013 and later) or the older iWork '09 one.
- The preview picture. Every file saved by Pages, Numbers or Keynote 2013 and later carries
preview.jpg: the first page, sheet or slide as the app drew it, with the real fonts and layout. It is shown large and can be saved. - Pages: the text. The body of the document in order, one paragraph per block, with Copy as plain text and Save as .txt. Headers, footers, footnotes, comments and text boxes are listed under it.
- Keynote: every slide. In slide order, each with its title, the rest of its text, its speaker notes and Keynote's own thumbnail of it. Skipped slides are marked. The whole deck's text, notes included, copies or saves as .txt.
- Numbers: the tables. Each table as a scrollable grid, one tab per table, read by the same SheetJS library as the spreadsheet viewer. Tap a cell for its value; save any table as CSV, which Excel and Google Sheets open. If SheetJS cannot read a file, every text string in it is listed instead.
- Pictures and media. Every file in the document's
Data/folder: photos, logos, slide backgrounds, movies and sounds, each with its size, viewable and saveable exactly as stored. - iWork '09 files. Their Quick Look thumbnail, and the PDF of the whole document that iWork '09 often saved inside (
QuickLook/Preview.pdf), to open in the browser's PDF viewer or save.
What is inside a .pages file
Since 2013, a Pages, Numbers or Keynote file is a ZIP archive, which is why the first two bytes above are PK. Renaming it to .zip and unzipping it gives you preview.jpg and the pictures in Data/, but not the text. The text is in Index/Document.iwa and the other .iwa files: Apple's own object archives, compressed with Google's Snappy (in a variant with no checksums) and encoded as Protocol Buffers. No Windows program reads them, and Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint do not open iWork files at all.
This page unpacks the .iwa files with a Snappy decoder and a Protocol Buffers reader written for it, following Sean O'Brien's public description of the format (github.com/obriensp/iWorkFileFormat). Text lives in objects of type 2001 (a text storage); Pages marks the running text as the body storage. Keynote keeps the order of the slides in a separate slide list, which matters: in Apache Tika's Keynote test file, the first slide shown is stored in Index/Slide-2.iwa, the second in Slide-1.iwa and the third in Slide.iwa. Reading the files in name order would put the title slide second, so the slide list is followed, and the page says so if it cannot be read.
Files it opens
- Pages, Numbers and Keynote 2013 and later
- Every version since Pages 5, Numbers 3 and Keynote 6 on the Mac (October 2013), and the iPhone, iPad and iCloud versions: all save the same single-file format. Text, slides, notes, tables, preview and pictures.
- A document that arrived as a folder
- A Mac can keep a document as a folder (a "package") holding
Index.zip,Data/andMetadata/. Copied to Windows by USB stick or a file share, it shows up as a folder named likeReport.pages. Zip that folder (right-click, Send to, Compressed folder) and drop the .zip here: it is read from inside the folder,Index.zipincluded. Most files arrive as a single file, which opens as it is. - iWork '09 (2009 to 2013)
- An older XML format (
index.xml, orindex.apxlfor Keynote). viewhack shows its thumbnail and its embedded PDF when it has one; reading the text is only done for 2013-and-later files.
What this cannot do
- Draw the pages or slides. Text and pictures only, like the .doc reader in the Word viewer: no page layout, fonts, colours, shapes, charts, tables drawn as tables (their cell text is listed under “Every piece of text”), or Keynote animations and transitions. The preview picture is the only view of the real layout, and it covers the first page or slide.
- Number the paragraphs as Pages does. List bullets and numbers, footnote marks and page numbers are not shown; the words are.
- Read Numbers formulas beyond SheetJS. Cells show their saved values. Charts, pictures and text boxes on a sheet are not drawn, and a table SheetJS cannot read falls back to a list of its text, not a grid.
- Open password-protected documents. A locked iWork file is encrypted with AES-128; it is recognised and refused, and only the preview picture, if any, is shown.
- Open a folder. A document kept as a package folder must be zipped first (see above); browsers cannot hand a folder to a page as one file.
- Edit or convert. It only reads. To get a Word, Excel or PowerPoint file, the sender can use File, Export To in Pages, Numbers or Keynote; iCloud.com also opens iWork files in a browser, after you sign in with an Apple Account and upload the file to Apple.