Works / WPS Office document converter
Convert .wps files from Microsoft Works or WPS Office Writer to Word DOCX or PDF. We detect which program made the file before converting it.
.wps
Format
About Works / WPS Office document
Two unrelated programs save files ending in .wps. Microsoft Works, the low-cost suite preinstalled on home PCs from the late 1980s until 2009, used .wps for its word processor, so family computers and school archives are full of Works letters, recipes, homework and newsletters. WPS Office Writer from Kingsoft, widely used in China and on Android phones, also saves .wps, and its files are Word 97 documents under a different name.
We look inside each file rather than trusting the extension. A Works for Windows file is a compound file whose CONTENTS stream begins with CHNKWKS or CHNKINK (Works 4 to 9) or holds MM and MN0 streams (Works 3 and 4); a Works for DOS file starts with the bytes 01 FE; a WPS Office file holds a WordDocument stream like any .doc. Some hospital and business systems also write HTML or RTF with a .wps name; those convert too, and a .wps that turns out to be plain text is refused with a note to rename it.
Works documents are simple by design, which helps: text, fonts, underlining, italics and clip-art convert closely in our tests, and pages break where Works broke them. WPS Office documents carry Word-style tables, numbering and headers, and those carry over into DOCX. Chinese typefaces such as SimSun and FangSong are substituted in a PDF, so page breaks can differ from WPS Office.
Convert Works / WPS Office document to…
Common Works / WPS Office document problems
An old Microsoft Works letter will not open in Word.
Use /convert/wps-to-docx; the converted file opens in Word, Google Docs and Pages.
Someone sent a .wps from WPS Office and you do not have it installed.
Convert with /convert/wps-to-pdf to read it, or /convert/wps-to-docx to reply with edits.
A .wps from a hospital or billing system opens as a web page in the browser.
It is an HTML report with a .wps name. It still converts here; for a cleaner result rename it .html and convert from HTML.
Cyrillic or other non-English text from a DOS Works file has a wrong letter.
Works for DOS used its own character table, and a test file lost one capital letter. Proofread against the original screen or printout.