I have a Lotus 1-2-3 file with macros. I used a free online utility to convert the file to .xlsx but it didn’t carry over the macros. Is there any way to extract the macros out of a 1-2-3 file without having Lotus 1-2-3 installed?
I haven’t used Lotus 1-2-3 in probably 30 years, and even then never used macros, but a quick google search suggests that you may be out of luck with this. The answer by user orlbuckeye in this thread on cb|net seems to be saying the the Lotus 1-2-3 macros were just embedded key commands that invoked functions and so are not compatible with Excel macros which are VBA code. Note that the discussion in the thread linked above dates back to 2014.
Open Office / Libre Office might be able to open them and allow you see the macros. (or as moes lotion says, the stored keypress sequences)
That’s exactly what I’m looking for. Not a conversion to Excel, just the algorithm. I can reverse engineer it if I can see the keystrokes.
I will give that a try. It’s certainly easier than what I’m trying to do:
In the meantime, I found a site with abandonware that has Lotus 1-2-3 v4 for DOS on diskette images. I installed a DOS emulator, converted the diskette images to ISO images, and when I try to install it, the installer says I have not entered my name and company yet, clean the install directory and try again. But it’s clean. I haven’t figured out how to make Lotus think this is a clean install.
My memory of how Lotus works is very bad. It looks like the macro commands are stored in worksheet cells, not in some separate module of some kind. But they are in column Y–I just didn’t scroll over far enough. Now I just need to remember how to read them 
Brings back memories. In the late 1990s I worked for a company that was owned by a Canadian corporation. They mandated that all PCs run Lotus, WordPerfect, and (I think) dBase. I had some experience with Lotus when I was hired, but that was it. I was much more familiar with Excel and Word (even back then), but company policy was we use Canadian products where there was an option, and for the software, they considered it a viable option.
When Y2K rolled around, they decided to put the whole company on a network (up until then, each department was on their own (and I think only Sales had any kind of network) with most departments only having a single PC. With the network upgrade, we also got Word, Excel, Access, and Outlook. Working in Engineering, I got to re-construct the spreadsheets in Excel. We ended up hiring an Engineering Intern to make an Access Database to mimic the dBase (the two programs just handled the data entirely differently so it was easier to just build a new one from scratch).
I don’t envy you. It was a headache for me 20 years ago when spreadsheets were much simpler. Today, I think it would drive me over the edge to relearn @-functions and the like just to be switch the stuff over so I could forget it all, again.
Another possible approach: find a copy (apparently released into the wild, legitimately, by the publisher Trius) of As Easy As (1-2-3). It was strongly Lotus 1-2-3 compatible, but I am not sure about macros. We used it as a teaching aid at a university I taught in.
I just remember the first line of every macro I ever wrote in 123: /FS
(123 was notorious for crashing without warning, so it was considered wise in my workplace to save your file before doing anything else in a macro.)