Like most time-consuming retro computing projects it started off with some idle time and a pretty bad idea. Basically I found myself sitting on a three hour conference call in my man cave wishing I could use the Tandy 1000 sitting on my desk as my primary office machine. I started tinkering with a handful of DOS productivity suites like Deskmate, Spinnaker Eight in One, PFS First Choice, Geoworks, and maybe a few others I don't recall.

I quickly found myself focusing on Works. It's actually a pretty decent piece of software, commands/hotkeys are pretty close to modern Windows app design, and having multiple windows seemed pretty useful. Basic spreadsheets are very usable, formulas are largely compatible with Google Sheets/Excel, and the macro system is quite good. There's no spreadsheet tabs support but for doing the family budget, calculating retirement, etc. it's perfect. So I proceeded with a test migration of a few of my Google docs to Works...

The word processor imported a sample of exported RTF google docs with very little issues, although the proportional fonts vs. fixed-width fonts did cause me to clear up a few line wrap issues, but generally it was automatically handled perfectly well. The spreadsheet imported the CSV files fine but lost the formulas.

My next thought was "Hm, it'd be nice if I could access the same documents from my 486 with VGA too." I have etherdfs setup so that both the Tandy and my 486 system have an F: drive mapped to the same network share. I created a Document folder on that network share, created a batch file on each system that changes to f:\document and then launches c:\works\works.exe. Viola, each system boots up into an identical environment with the same documents available under File/Open. That's nice, now I can edit big spreadsheets in 80x50 mode rather than 80x25 on Tandy.

Now I was left with the question of accessing the documents from other, non-MSDOS machines on my local network. That ended up a trivial task, I created an SMB share to the Documents drive and used Dosbox-X to map an F: drive identically to the two physical DOS machines. Now I can update my budget.wks and home inventory from my Windows 11 laptop! Excellent!

I also recalled from an old, old project that I once found a dos emulator that could run non-graphical MSDOS apps in a putty session. After a little refreshing my memory and a fair amount of google searching I discovered DOSEMU/DOSEMU2 support this, so after a quick download and compile of DOSEMU2 I now have the capability to SSH into a raspberry pi and have an almost identical Works experience that I have on my physical machines, including running on my phone if I were desperate enough. This unexpectedly gave me copy/paste support from my modern windows machines to the Works instance, which made updating my spreadsheet formulas very very easy.

At this point I became concerned about interoperability. I mean, let's go totally crazy and think I actually start using this old-ass MSDOS system to hold important information, how in the hell would my wife ever find it or figure out how to access it if I got hit by a bus? I have a folder on my file server syncing to Google Drive so I simply redirected the F: drive on all three machines to a new share on that Google drive folder, and viola I have wks, wps, wdb files syncing to Google WITH change history tracking/version tracking. That's pretty spiffy.

Now I faced a tough question, can anything even OPEN these old Word files? Yes, actually. LibreOffice opens the files just fine, including all formulas AND charts in worksheets, and with formatting intact. What it CAN'T do, is save the files back in the Works 3.0 format, sadly, or it would be perfect, but giving loved ones the ability to read my old files and save as a modern format is probably good enough in the event that I kick the bucket unexpectedly I suppose?

As a failsafe, I found that the save dialogs in MS Works all include a text output as the second save format option. For database and spreadsheet it is a CSV file, for documents it's just a plain text file. I mentioned previously that the Works macro system is VERY VERY useful, and I mapped Ctrl-S to save the local copy, then File/Save As, select the second format, and save as a plain text file in the same Google Drive-synced folder. Google Drive lets me natively view the plain text files without any conversion required, so I think that pretty much covers the last of the bases.

So now I can access MS Works 3.0 and my documents from anywhere as easily as I access my Google Drive documents, plus they sync to the cloud and have version history/recoverability in the event I screw something up. I'm actually really pleased with how well this all works. I might see if I can get the windows version of Works running on Windows 11 and on my PII Windows 95 machine just to complete the experience...