We invite several hundred people to a holiday party. Karen started keeping postal addresses in a ClarisWorks database. This transitioned to AppleWorks which Apple abandoned with OS X Lion.
I was slow to convert to Lion so I could still run AppleWorks which Karen forwarded to me with the database file. This opened. I could see the data. But I couldn't get it out.
Support forums suggested saving the database content as a text file. Funny, my Save As dialog didn't offer this option. (Later we discovered this was an extension that Karen didn't forward.)
We finally got the data transfered to Apple Numbers which was reported to support the same address label printing capabilities that drove Karen to ClarisWorks in the beginning. I tacked the recovery story onto the document as a record of the "provenance" .
Recovery
The document was imported from the original Christmas Card List stored as an AppleWorks 6 database.
The contents of the database was displayed as a table, this was copied with Select All, copy and then paste into an empty AppleWorks spreadsheet.
The spreadsheet was saved as Christmas-spreadsheet-all.cwk and then opened in Numbers 9.
The column headings did not transfer in this process. (SelectAll did not select column headings).
I created a new Numbers heading row and transcribed the database column headings by hand.
I then added this second sheet of documentation and saved the result as Christmas-spreadsheet-all.numbers.
Karen had trouble opening this so I tried saving it as an iWork 08 file.Christmas-spreadsheet-all-08.numbers.
Numbers 08 didn't support comments so I moved this content to a single-cell table.
Notes
I keep the email-only version of our invitation list in a text file and process it with a perl program.