Extract text from QuickWriter documents (QW)
To convert QW documents to another format, you need QuickWriter or other Text software.
To convert other file formats to the "Legacy Word Processor File" file type, you need software like QuickWriter or a similar tool.
The .qw file format generally represents two entirely different types of legacy data: QuickWriter word processor documents (often associated with Symantec's older Q&A software) and Quicken Windows Data Files. A QuickWriter file stores formatted text and basic layout structures from early 1990s word processing applications. A Quicken .qw file, on the other hand, was used by Quicken to store proprietary financial data, account structures, and transaction ledgers.
The primary disadvantage of the .qw format today is that it is severely outdated and entirely closed-source. You cannot simply double-click these files to open them on modern Windows or macOS systems. If it is a word processing document, modern software like Microsoft Word or Google Docs will fail to recognize the binary encoding, displaying only garbage characters. If it is a financial file, it requires extremely specific, discontinued versions of Quicken to read, making the financial data practically locked away and useless for current accounting software.
If you are dealing with a QuickWriter document, the best conversion targets are TXT (to recover raw text, losing original formatting), RTF (to attempt preserving basic layout), or DOCX. For Quicken financial data, you ideally want to extract the information into standard CSV or QIF (Quicken Interchange Format) files so it can be imported into modern spreadsheets like Microsoft Excel.
Unfortunately, standard online converters almost always fail with .qw files because the format relies on undocumented binary headers that generic parsers cannot interpret. Often, only the original legacy software can properly read or export the structured data. However, just drag and drop your file to identify the format, view it, and convert it when possible on convert.guru. Our analysis engine can inspect the internal hexadecimal structure, strip out obsolete printer codes, and extract any embedded text strings safely.
Convert.Guru analyzes your QW file, detects the exact format, and lets you read the text inside.
Users also converted GPX, PTC and TABLE files.
If you want to convert QW file to , you can use QuickWriter or similar software from the "Legacy Word Processing Document" category. In the File menu, look for Save As… or Export….
To convert files to QW, try QuickWriter or another comparable tool in the "Legacy Word Processing Document" category.
The history of Convert.Guru began over 25 years ago in California with Tom Simondi’s file-format database. A former contributor to Space Shuttle development and a software pioneer of the 1980s, Simondi established a trusted resource for file type analysis that was even referenced by Microsoft Windows XP. Today, we use modern technology to process and convert thousands of file formats while continually improving our QW converter.