Microsoft Works Spreadsheet converter
Convert Microsoft Works .wks and .xlr spreadsheets to Excel XLSX, keeping values, number formats and formulas.
.wks · .xlr
Format
About Microsoft Works Spreadsheet
Microsoft Works shipped a spreadsheet alongside its word processor. Older versions saved .wks files in a layout borrowed from Lotus 1-2-3, and later versions saved .xlr files that contain an Excel-style workbook. Household budgets, club accounts, school grade sheets and small-business ledgers from the 1990s and 2000s are often in one of these, and Works itself has not been sold since 2009.
A real Works or Lotus .wks starts with a short binary record (00 00 02 00, or FF 00 02 00 in Works for Windows) followed by a version number; an .xlr is a compound file with a Workbook stream. The .wks extension is also used by Linux image builders and KiCad for plain-text files, so we check the first bytes and refuse anything that is not a spreadsheet.
In our tests cell values, number formats, fonts, colours and alignment came through, and formulas arrived as live Excel formulas with their results cached. The one wobble was dates: a long-form date and clock times became real Excel values, while a month/day/year date in the same sheet arrived as text and needed Text to Columns to fix.
Convert Microsoft Works Spreadsheet to…
Common Microsoft Works Spreadsheet problems
Excel will not open an old Works spreadsheet.
Use /convert/wks-to-xlsx; the XLSX opens in Excel, Google Sheets and Numbers without changing any settings.
A converted date column sorts alphabetically.
Some cells arrived as text. In Excel select the column, choose Data → Text to Columns, pick Date (MDY) and finish.
The file is called .wks but the converter refuses it.
Open it in a text editor. If you see readable configuration lines, it is a build or CAD file that only shares the extension, not a spreadsheet.