The Pages app on Mac is a simple word processor and is very similar to the Microsoft Word found on the Windows operating system. Any document that you create/edit using the Pages app are saved with the “.pages” file extension. Normally, this particular file extension is not visible to the mac users but when you share it with anyone using a Windows PC, it will show the .pages extension near the file name and will look like a unreadable file by default. This is because none of the default Windows apps are programmed to handle Pages format files out of the box. But this does not mean that they cannot handle the .pages file at all.

There is a simple trick to open the .Pages format file using Microsoft Windows apps such as MS Word. For this you have to convince Windows that the pages file is not actually in pages format, but rather a zip file. In windows, this can be done by simply changing the file extension from the Windows Explorer. Even though this may not sound like a optimal solution, this actually works. You know what they say… It’s not stupid if it works.

How Open Pages Format File from Mac in Microsoft Windows Using MS Office

1. Save the Pages format file somewhere easily accessible to Windows Explorer.
2. Right-click on the .pages file and choose “Rename”.
3. Delete the “.pages” extension at the end and add “.zip”.
4. Then hit the Enter key to save the changes. You might be asked to confirm the file extension change.
5. Now, open the .zip file (the one you just renamed) using the Microsoft Word or even WordPad. You should be able to see the contents of the file just fine.

Not able to see file extensions on Windows?

In order to see the file extensions on Windows, you may change a simple setting in the Windows Explorer. Go to View > Enable “File name extensions” check box. You can ignore any file extension change warning.

It is way easier than you thought it would be. Isn’t it? There is no need to use a program to convert these files and then again open them using a Windows application.  Once you open the file using the above method, you can save them in any file format you like and easily open them using native Windows apps.

When not to use this method…

• There will be formatting issues if the pages document you are trying to open is complex with lot of formatting. I would recommend to use this method as a last resort when there is absolutely no other way but to work with the file from Windows.
• If the pages document is password protected, this method will not work. You would first need to unlock it from a mac machine and have the unlocked pages document sent to Windows for further processing.

Open .pages files in Windows using iCloud

An alternative approach is to use iCloud. icloud.com has a web based version of the Pages app available and it can be used on any web browser – even Google Chrome on Microsoft Windows 10. The only con of this method is that it requires an Apple ID login but hey, you can create Apple ID for free in a matter of minutes. The plus side to using this method is that you can directly save from Pages iCloud.com app to a Windows compatible format like Microsoft Office and Word DOC / DOCX file formats.

Know of a better method? Share with us in the comments!

Source: Microsoft Community