a folder of .pages files, and the person asking for them has Word

exporting one Pages, Numbers or Keynote file to Word, Excel or PowerPoint

1. open the document in the app that made it — Pages, Numbers or Keynote.
2. File → Export To, then Word, Excel or PowerPoint. PDF sits in the same menu.
3. click Save. the export is a copy; the original .pages, .numbers or .key file stays where it was.

the menu path and the export formats of all three apps, on Mac, iPhone and iCloud.com: Apple Support, convert Pages, Numbers or Keynote files

the same export exists where there is no Mac at all. on iCloud.com, open the app, click the «…» button on the file and choose Download a Copy — it asks which format, and Word, Excel and PowerPoint are on the list. on an iPhone or iPad it is the Share button → Export and Send. so a .pages file that arrived from somewhere and cannot be opened on a Windows machine is not stuck: any Apple ID and a browser will turn it into a .docx.

all three routes share one limit. they take one document at a time, and each one opens a dialog that wants a click. for a handful of files that is fine. for a folder it is the whole problem.

the mirror image of this job — Word files that need to become pdfs — has the same shape and a worse free route: convert Word documents to pdf in batch

batch converting Pages to docx with AppleScript, and where it breaks

every forum thread on this ends at the same place: an AppleScript that opens each document in Pages, tells Pages to export it, and closes it. it is the real answer, it is free, and it works — a three-file run on macOS 26 took four seconds and wrote valid .docx files. what costs you is everything around it.

what the script actually does

Pages, Numbers and Keynote each have a scripting dictionary with an «export» command. Pages exports as Word, PDF, EPUB, rich text or plain text; Numbers as Excel, PDF or CSV; Keynote as PowerPoint, PDF, HTML, a movie or slide images. the script loops over the files you point it at, opens each one, calls export with the format you want, and closes the document without saving. you paste it into Script Editor, save it as an application, drop a folder on it.

that last sentence is the price. you need to know the script exists, find one that is not from 2016, read enough AppleScript to change the output format, and know that a .DS_Store in the folder will be handed to Pages as if it were a document. and it is one script per app: the Pages one does not know what a .numbers file is.

the thread most people land on, with the script and the reports of it writing nothing: Apple Community, batch convert .pages to .docx

Shortcuts and Automator have no export action

the obvious modern route would be Shortcuts: Pages, Numbers and Keynote all register actions with it. but look at what they register — Create New Document, Open Document, Open in Presenter Mode. no Export, in any of the three. Automator is the same story: its library has no Pages action, so the «Automator solution» in every thread is a Run AppleScript step wrapping the script above.

the failure you will hit first is not in the script. Pages behind a first-run dialog — «what's new», an iCloud prompt — answers the script with «Can't make class document» and exits, and nothing is written. that is what the thread author saw. quit Pages, open it once by hand, dismiss whatever it shows, run the script again.

the script rebuilt for docx and pdf at once, and the .DS_Store and «close» failures along the way: Automators Talk, batch converting Pages to docx and pdf

for images the folder problem is already solved inside Finder — a right-click converts a selection — which is exactly the thing documents never got: convert heic to jpg

so what turns the whole folder into Office files

for one document, or three, stop here: File → Export To is the answer and nothing improves on it. for a folder, macOS gives you the AppleScript route and nothing else — the online converters in the same search results upload your documents to someone's server and hand back a zip, which is a strange trade for files that were private enough to be written in Pages.

the free route is real. what it costs is knowing it exists, assembling it, and doing it three times over if the folder mixes documents, spreadsheets and decks. a converter exists for that folder.

the same trade shows up on the video side, where the free route also costs knowing what to type: convert mov to mp4

how hop converts Pages, Numbers and Keynote in batches

hop's converter takes iWork documents alongside everything else it takes. drop a folder of .pages, .numbers and .key files on it and they come out as pdf, or as docx, xlsx and pptx — the export is done by Pages, Numbers and Keynote themselves, so the file you get is the one File → Export To would have given you, without sitting through the dialog for each one.

• a mixed folder is one drop. hop sorts out which app owns which file; you do not run three scripts.
• originals stay untouched, and the results land beside them as copies — the same rule as the rest of the converter.
• Word files go the other way too: .docx, .doc and .rtf to pdf or markdown, and markdown to pdf laid out by hop itself.
• everything runs on your Mac. nothing is uploaded, and there is no office suite bundled inside the app.

the converter as a whole — images, video, audio and documents in the same window: the file converter

the honest boundary is in the last row. the export is Apple's in both cases, so what Word makes of a complicated Pages layout is the same whether the script or hop asked for it. what hop removes is the script.

and if the destination was pdf and the result is too large to send: compress a pdf on Mac

when the exported file comes out wrong

• the script ran and no files appeared. Pages, Numbers or Keynote was sitting behind a dialog. quit the app, open it by hand, clear whatever it shows, run again.
• the script stopped on a file that is not a document. that is .DS_Store, or a file Finder shows without its extension; the loop handed it to Pages as if it were a .pages file. filter by extension, or move the odd files out.
• the fonts changed in Word. the document used a font that is on your Mac and not embedded; Word on the other machine substituted, and everything reflowed from there. one file through File → Export To comes out the same way; the batch did not add this.
• the Keynote deck opens in PowerPoint without its transitions and some of the builds. the two apps do not share an animation model, and the export keeps what maps across.
• the Numbers sheet came out as several Excel sheets. Numbers puts several tables on one sheet and Excel does not; the export panel offers one worksheet per table or per sheet, and the script takes the default without asking you.
• the .pages file will not open at all. it may be from Pages '08 or earlier; the current app reads Pages '09 and later, and older files need a pass through Pages '09 first.
• you sent a .pages file to a Windows machine and it arrived as a folder. a .pages file is a package — a folder pretending to be a file — and zipping it exposes that. export first, send the .docx.
• the export asked about a password. a password-protected document keeps, changes or drops the password on the exported copy; the batch script does not answer that dialog, so protected files stall it. take them out and export them by hand.

what happens to the password, smart annotations and comments on export: Apple, Pages User Guide — export to Word, PDF or another format

the folder-in-disguise problem has a name, and it is the thing Windows users ask about most: what the __MACOSX folder in a zip is

frequently asked questions

how do i convert multiple Pages files to Word at once?

macOS has no built-in way. the free route is an AppleScript that opens each file in Pages and calls its export command, run from Script Editor. a converter that takes iWork documents does it in one drop. File → Export To in Pages is one document at a time.

can i convert Pages to docx without a Mac?

yes, one file at a time. sign in to iCloud.com, open Pages, click the «…» button on the file and choose Download a Copy, then pick Word. an iPhone or iPad does it with Share → Export and Send.

does converting Pages to docx keep the formatting?

mostly, and the same either way: the export is done by Pages itself whether you click the menu, run a script or use hop. what moves is fonts that are not on the other machine and layout features Word does not have. Apple makes no promise that a Pages export looks in Word exactly as it did in Pages — that line is from its own community moderators.

can Shortcuts or Automator batch export Pages, Numbers or Keynote?

not on their own. all three apps give Shortcuts actions to create and open documents, and none to export them. Automator has no Pages action at all. both can run an AppleScript, which is what every «Automator solution» actually is.

why does the AppleScript say «can't make class document»?

Pages is open but stuck behind a dialog — what's new, an iCloud prompt, a template chooser — and cannot take commands. quit it, open it by hand, dismiss the dialog, run the script again. the same error is behind the «script closes and writes nothing» reports.

can i batch convert Keynote to PowerPoint and Numbers to Excel the same way?

yes, with a separate script for each app: Keynote exports as Microsoft PowerPoint, Numbers as Microsoft Excel, through the same export command. one script does not cover the three formats, which is why a mixed folder is where a converter earns its place.

do i need Microsoft Word installed?

no. Pages writes the .docx itself, and the same goes for Excel and PowerPoint files from Numbers and Keynote. you need the Apple apps, not the Microsoft ones — and hop drives the Apple apps, so it needs them too.

what happens to the original .pages files?

nothing. every export — the menu, the script, iCloud.com, hop — writes a new file in the new format and leaves the original where it was. delete the originals yourself if you no longer want them.

the tool behind this

done with convert and compress

other things people do

• a folder of heic, and something that wants jpgfile converter
• mov and mp4 are often the same filefile converter
• QuickTime will not open it. the video is fine.file converter