How to Open a .pages File on Windows, Android or Any Computer

What a .pages file is, and why it will not open

Pages is Apple's word processor. It comes free with every Mac, iPhone and iPad, so plenty of letters, CVs, school work and contracts are written in it — and saved as .pages unless the writer thinks to export them.

The trouble is that the format belongs to Apple alone. Apple has never published how it works, and Pages is the only program that lays it out. Microsoft Word, Google Docs and LibreOffice cannot open documents from current versions of Pages at all. So on Windows, Android or a Chromebook you need either something that takes the file apart, or Pages itself — which, usefully, also runs in a browser.

Read it now, in your browser

The quickest route, and the only one with no account and no upload, is the Pages opener:

1. Open the page in any browser — Chrome, Edge, Firefox or Safari, on a computer or a phone.
2. Drop the .pages file onto it. It is read on your device.
3. Read it at once: the text and tables in document order, then any text boxes, headers and footnotes, and the pictures.
4. Save it as a Word document (.docx) with the tables and pictures in place, or as plain text, or save the pictures on their own.

What you get depends on what the file carries, and the page tells you which:

• The text, tables and pictures — from current files.Every paragraph in order, each table as a table where it sits, and each picture as the original file, marked in the text as [Picture 1], [Picture 2]. The page design — fonts, colours, columns — stays behind, because that is computed by Pages itself. Files from Pages '09 and earlier give their text without tables; for those, the embedded PDF below is the better route.
• A picture of the first page — usually. Pages stores one in each document for thumbnails. It is exact, but it is only page one.
• The whole document as a PDF — in older files. Documents saved by versions of Pages from before 2013 usually carry a complete PDF that Pages made itself. When one is there, you can download it with every page exact.

The exact layout, free, through iCloud.com

When you need every page exactly as the writer saw it — to print a contract, or to edit a CV without rebuilding its design — the answer is Pages itself. Apple runs it in the browser at iCloud.com, free, and it works on Windows, Linux and Chromebooks. You need an Apple Account, which anyone can create without owning an Apple device.

1. Go to iCloud.com and sign in, or create a free Apple Account.
2. Open Pages from the list of apps.
3. Upload the .pages file — drag it into the window — and open it.
4. Choose Download a Copy from the More menu, then PDF to print or share, or Word to keep editing.

This is the most faithful conversion available without a Mac, because Pages does the layout. The cost is an account and an upload: the document goes to your iCloud storage at Apple. For most documents that is fine; for confidential ones, see the privacy note below.

Ask the sender to export it

It takes the sender ten seconds, and it is the cleanest fix when you will be receiving more documents from them:

• On a Mac: File › Export To › PDF, or Word.
• On an iPhone or iPad: tap the More button (•••), then Export, then PDF or Word.

What is inside a .pages file

A .pages file is a ZIP archive with a different extension. Rename a copy to .zip and Windows will open it as a folder. What you find depends on the version of Pages that saved it:

• Pages 5 and later (2013 onwards): an Index folder of .iwa files, which hold the document in Apple's compressed format, and preview.jpg, the picture of page one, and a Data folder with the pictures that were put into the document (alongside a few decorative files from the template).
• Pages '09 and earlier: an XML description of the document and a QuickLook folder that usually holds Preview.pdf — the whole document as a PDF.

The .iwa files cannot be read by hand; they are compressed binary data in a format Apple has never documented. The Pages opener decompresses them in your browser and follows them the way Pages does — paragraphs, then the tables anchored in them and the cells of each table, then the pictures and which file in Data each one is — using the same publicly documented reverse engineering that open-source iWork readers rely on. That recovers the content reliably. The layout is another matter — it is computed by Pages when the document is displayed, which is why the page never claims to rebuild it.

Which route for which job

• “I just need to read it.” The Pages opener. Seconds, no account, no upload.
• “I need to quote or reuse the text.”The Pages opener's Word or text download. The words, tables and pictures come across; the styling does not.
• “I need it exactly as it looked.” The embedded PDF, if the opener finds one; otherwise iCloud.com, or ask the sender.
• “I need to edit it with its design intact.” iCloud.com's Download a Copy › Word, or Pages on iCloud.com directly.

Confidential documents

Contracts, medical letters and HR paperwork are exactly the documents people are nervous about putting into an online converter, and they are right to be: most of them upload the file to their own servers. The Pages opener does not — the whole job runs in your browser tab, and you can confirm it in the Network tab of the developer tools.

iCloud.com does upload the document, to your own iCloud storage at Apple. That is a reasonable place for most files, but if a document should not leave your hands at all, read it with the opener, and ask the sender for a PDF when you need the layout. There is more on judging any tool in the safety checklist.

Frequently asked questions