I have a bunch of .SAM files created in the 90’s. Will LibreOffice allow me to access/open ami pro files? Any program I have won’t work
Of course, any contribution of interested parties in the field of support of external formats is welcome by the Document Liberation Project (one of TDF projects, used in LibreOffice and other FLOSS).
Just for fun, try replacing the .SAM extension with .lwp
Lotus bought Ami Pro and turned it into Lotus Word Pro. They may have kept the format the same for the file and just changed the extension. A long shot, but might work.
Changing the file extention won’t work. The file formats are different.
It is likely that LibreOffice won’t be able to read these files. Have your tested it yet? which is the simplest thing to do.
Other than that, you could search the web for legacy software repository or vintage sites and then download a copy. Of course, modern Windows OS’es will not support the application (I suppose it runs under Windows 3.x or earlier). The workaround may be to install a Linux partition on your computer and run the legacy app with Wine emulator, at least to export your data as text or CSV (for spreadsheet).
After this export, you can reload the unformatted data in LibreOffice or other current office suite.
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Lotus SmartSuite runs on WIndows 10 for me. It will open .sam files. If you want to update the files, Lotus SmartSuite will save as .lwp files which LibreOffice handles reasonably well.
Once you have it open in WordPro it is best to save as .doc file, that way you will get better layout and images than .lwp in LibreOffice. Once that is done, you can open and save them as .odt and have some future-proofing.
You can install StarOffice 7. The word processor in it will open Ami Pro files… more or less correctly; all the text will be there, but the formatting seems slightly, or more, off.
You can go to:
www.staroffice.org
and download it.
It works for me, and I run Win 10 on a very recent Intel chip.
I downloaded QuickViewPlus. It opened a 3 line .SAM file but then I discovered that my 3.5" floppies were all damaged so I don’t need anymore help on this… thanks all for the answers/help.
Do not answer your own question unless it is a real answer. Use the comment option.
I think that finding and sharing about the venerable QuickViewPlus (available and now apparently free) is a real answer and might be the only answer for some people wanting to open and recover their old documents. I up-ticked it. Cheers, Al
NYM.NYM (karma: 1)
I just joined and saw this post so want to help because I know other people will be looking at it too.
when I originally bought smart Suite 20 years ago right off the bat, I was thinking way way ahead in case I needed to do this, I decided to dabble with it and I just renamed a lot of my (copies of copies) lwp and bak sam to.txt.
I very well knew all of the text-based documents out there of which and lwp sam and bak are ALL
just text based .
easy peasy you can do batches of them if you have a great free renamer.
:::::::important:::::::::: do not simply tack on the. Txt extension to the document extension …you need to REPLACE the extension with. Txt
open with notepad or viewer of your choice.
you will see all text and date and fonts you used.
images are not there of course. disregard the programming areas.
have used it on winxp win7 win2000.
nym.nym
Edited for spelling :0 
You do know that LibreOffice will open .lwp files. Layout might not be much like the original but the text will be there
Happy Monday Earnest and yes, I do know that.
There are many ways (sometimes) and no telling what people like to do to achieve the same goal :)
Of course this was 20 years ago. :)
Jury is still partially out on if Libre will achieve my comfort I had with LWrite/Smartsuite for that long. Working at it tho.
If you have a PC with Lotus Smartsuite still installed, you can probably open the SAM files and then save them as something else. Years ago, a very helpful chap created a marvellous utility to convert Lotus Word Pro .lwp files to various formats, the latest of which was Word 2000. I still have it, it still works and I can send it if needed.
Mark
LibreOffice cannot open Ami Pro .sam files. But there are a few other solutions which work in Windows (or in a Windows virtual machine).
- If you have an old version of MS Office (up to version 2003), there is a converter plugin for Word which works to open .sam files. It does not import the embedded the pictures. I believe it was originally part of a Microsoft Converter pack, but that is not available any more. However I found it here: http://www.lotusamipro.com/files/word2ami.zip
It’s just a “Ami332.cnv” file which needs to be copied to “C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\TextConv\” - You can install Lotus SmartSuite 9.8 in a Windows machine. It can be downloaded from here: WinWorld: Lotus SmartSuite 9.8. This will also import embedded pictures and will preserve them when exporting to MS Word 97.
- Finally, if you just want to have a look at the text content, you can open them in text viewer. The .sam files are plain ASCII text, except for embedded images. So if only the text content is needed, it would be possible to extract it with a relatively simple perl/python/whatever script. Accented characters use a strange encoding however: “é” is written as “<\i>” in the file, “à” as “<`>”, etc. So converting these would require a little translation table.
(See also this blog post with more details)