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Opening old Keynote/Pages files in new versions

Greetings readers! I hope you are all enjoying the break and getting ready for 2016.

This time I wanted to bring to your attention some information that you may find to be very useful. Particularly if, like me, you happen to have need some old slides, presentations or talks you have in Keynote but forgot (or rather did not need) to update to a newer version of the software. You may have thought that there would be some backward compatibility for this sort of thing, and you may be surprised that there is not an obvious click-and-update type solution. Nonetheless, not all is lost and you would not have to trash your presentations, unless of course they were not the slides you were looking for… This trick also works with Pages by the way.

You may find that when opening your old slide decks, Keynotes complains with:

This document can't be opened because it's too old. To open it, save it with Keynote '09 first.

Keynote Compatibility Issue

and Pages with:

This document can't be opened because it's too old. To open it, save it with Pages '09 first.

Of course, if you have both versions installed this should not be a problem, but why would you do that? So, if you cannot open the old file in the first place, here is what you need to do (please make sure that you have a backup copy of your file… you never know…):

  1. Open the Terminal and navigate to the directory where the old file is saved. So if your file is called
    my_presentation.keynote

    and it is saved in your Desktop just type 

    > cd Desktop
  2. Rename the file with a .zip extension:
    > mv my_presentation.keynote my_presentation.zip
  3. Unzip the file: 
    > unzip my_presentation.zip -d my_presentation
  4. Type the following command:
    gunzip --stdout index.apxl.gz | sed 's-:version="72007061400"-:version="92008102400"-g' > index.apxl

    and hit return. If you do not get any errors you are good to go.

  5. Remove the 
    index.apxl.gz
  6. Re-compress the folder and change the extension to the original one.

Try opening your file, it may still complain but at least you will be able to open it. Et voilà!