I have Lotus Smartsuite (Lotus WordPro 97) files and need to
convert them to Office 2003 (Word) documents. Does anyone have
an update or fix for this?
1. Don't do anything with them on a diskette. As with all files of all types, first copy them to a local hard disk.
2. If you still have a relationship with the author/editor who sent them to you, ask him/her to re-save them as Word 2000 from within Word Pro.
3. You can buy Lotus SmartSuite v. 9.8 incredibly inexpensively from resellers such as Tekdeal.com and convert it yourself. That will probably be less time and expense than any other approach. Once you have the software (and you can run it off the CD if you or your IT dept prefers not to install it to the network), you can download a batch converter from Xpertss.com .
4. I've heard that StarOffice--but not OpenOffice.org--has a converter, but I don't know anything about its performance.
5. If you have a Verity KeyViewer, it will allow you to view, and presumably to print to an OCR setup, Lotus files of various types.