Preserve original creation date when Saving As

[Word5.1freak]

I have OS 10.8.5 (Mountain Lion), and I find that I can't open any of my Word 5.1 files that I created over a decade. I have been using my husband's Windows machine to open them, then save them as .rtf files, and then use A Better Finder Attributes to change the creation/ last modification dates to match the original ones so that I know when the documents were created. This is exceedingly time-consuming, and I have over 2,000 .mcw (Word 5.1) files. Is there a way to "save as" without changing the original creation date? Thank you!!!

 

[oldscribe]

Hi and welcome,


Not sure about word but in pages you can use Shift-Command-S Keyboard Shortcut for the Save as.

 

[Word5.1freak]

Thanks for your reply. I'm actually interested in knowing how to preserve the original creation date, or the last modification date, when I do Save As. Does anyone know if this is possible? I'm willing to purchase software if necessary.

 

[Cory Cooper]

Hello and welcome.

Unfortunately, I don't believe there is any way to do this, nor any Mac software capable of it. Because you are doing the conversion on a Windows machine, I would try searching for Windows-compatible software to do this. But, once the file is converted on the Windows PC, the date will usually change when it is copied to the Mac.

Will look into it further.
C

 

[oldscribe]

Hi,

I'm actually interested in knowing how to preserve the original creation date

I agree with Cory on this, as I said pages does this automatically as you can see from my screen shot, but never used word.

 

[Word5.1freak]

Thanks to both of you. Oldscribe, when you say that Pages does "this" automatically, are you saying that if you save your Pages document as an RTF file, it will preserve the original creation date? I.e., will the Pages document and the RTF document be dated the same, even if you did Save As RTF on a totally different date? In your screen shot, I could only see that the Date Modified was different. To Cory: For some reason, when I copy over the files I've converted to RTF on the Windows machine, my Mac doesn't overwrite the creation date, thank goodness. For example, if I save a converted-to-RTF-on-Windows document to my USB drive on 1/31 at 8:15 a.m., and then I save it onto my Mac on 2/1, it still has the 1/31 creation date. So, that part won't be a problem. Thank you so much!!

 

[oldscribe]

Hi,

Possibly an easier route would be to use Apples textedit, as it save direct to RTF as my screen shot shows. Also preserves the creation date and time + edited date and time.

 

[Word5.1freak]

Thanks Oldscribe. Unfortunately, TextEdit doesn't preserve any of the formatting for my Word 5.1a documents, since it's a text-only program (or am I doing something wrong?). I have a lot of documents in Japanese, for example, and none of those come out in TextEdit. I'm about ready to give up and just do everything slowly over the course of a year or so by converting 5-10 documents a day....

 

[oldscribe]

Hi,

I have a lot of documents in Japanese

OH yes I now see, sorry not sure what would help, unless you possibly added the Japanese keyboard via system preferences - Keyboards - Input sources then +.
As screen shot.

 

[Word5.1freak]

Thanks a lot, Oldscribe and Cory, for your help. I think I'll just keep plugging away for a year or so, converting some files each day and revising the creation/modification dates using A Better Finder Attributes, until I've finished all 2,000+ files. TextEdit doesn't open Japanese (and other) fonts properly (I did add the Japanese, Greek, Chinese, Korean keyboard systems a long time ago). I've been trolling the internet to figure this out, but there doesn't seem to be a way to solve my problem.... Thanks again, though!

 

[Kaveman]

Yes, MicroSoft changed the file format of Word 5 files, both Office 2004 and 2008 open these files, so you may be able to find these older versions.

This is a growing problem with proprietary formats, people confuse ubiquity with open standards. I recommend a system in place to ensure files don't become locked into proprietary formats. (Pages, Numbers and Keynote we're looking at you!)

Save As... makes a new file, so it must have the time/date stamp of when it was created, I believe Windows also works like this. I'm not even sure new versions of Office would preserve the creation dates on the converted docs.

 

[Word5.1freak]

Yes, Kaveman, thanks a lot for your reply. I'm hoping that, by converting to RTF, I won't have this problem any more in the future. Although I hear that RTF isn't all it was cracked up to be....