Quickly find old Keynote and Pages documents

Aug 21, '07 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: vocaro

With every new version of iWork come new file formats for Keynote and Pages. The old files won't convert transparently into the new versions; you have to explicitly save them to the new formats. And one wonders if these old formats may one day be declared obsolete, unable to be opened at all by some future version of iWork.

To avoid these issues, I always upgrade my Pages and Keynote documents to the latest format whenever a new version of iWork comes out. An automatic means of doing this would involve some hard-core AppleScript, but since I don't have too many iWork documents, I'm content with opening and re-saving them to their new format manually. The only problem: How do I find the Pages and Keynote documents scattered throughout my Documents sub-folders?

Luckily, the Finder's Smart Folders feature makes this easy. Just create a new Smart Folder, and for the first criterion, choose Other, then select Name Extension from the list and click OK. Enter pages in the text box. For the next criterion, choose Last Modified with the date range set to Before. Finally, click Save and you will have a Smart Folder containing all your old Pages documents. Repeat the process, but use key for the Name Extension to get a folder of all Keynote documents instead.

[robg adds: If you prefer, you can make one saved search that covers both Keynote and Pages by selecting Raw Query from the Other menu, and entering this query:

(kMDItemFSName = '*.pages'c)||(kMDItemFSName = '*.key'c)
Somewhat oddly, in the results list, I found my Keynote presentations spread across the sections marked Presentations, Documents, and Other. I haven't yet investigated why they weren't all together in Presentations.]

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