A customer has sent me a document that was prepared on a Macintosh G4
Powerbook in the latest version of Apple Works.  The document was sent
as an attachment to an email and has a suffix ".cwk"  The email is
legible, but I cannot figure out how to open the attachment.

Is there any easy and cheap way for me to open this on my PC using a
program that I already have, such as Word?  I already tried saving it
as a text file and opening it using Notepad and also Wordpad.  That
produces a document that has a lot of gibberish (and some sense, but
not enough).

I have a PC with Windows 2000 and the baseline Microsoft products,
like Word, Excel.

Recommendations?

As long as they have an updated version of AppleWorks, they can save a
file as a Word document.  They need to go to Save As and then select
the appropriate file type in the File Format pop-up menu.  Sometimes
the translation is a little funky, but it generally works pretty well.

Except for you having an expensive "conversion" program, you just need
tell your sender to Save the document as a .doc Word Document that you
can read and then send that to you, or, if the sender doesn't have the
latest Apple Works but does have Mac OS X, the sender can send you a
PDF file.  Here is what an Apple site said:

"Want to share your AppleWorks document with the world and have them see
it just as you intended? Or for them to view it without changing the file?
Thanks to the advanced Quartz graphics system in Mac OS X, simply save the
print preview and you automatically create a document in PDF format. Then
anyone with Adobe Acrobat Reader - or Mac OS X - can view what you made."

hope this helps......