Appleworks v6.2.9

I sometimes use Appleworks 6 to open a perl (.pl) file for editing.

For some reason, each time I do this the software automatically converts these files to a spreadsheet by default.

How can I change this behavior? I want it to open in word processing.

Why not use a code editor which is more appropriate for this type of file? There a few free ones like Atom, Brackets, VS Code and paid ones like Sublime Text and so on. Why would you want to use a word processing tool for this?