Appleworks.....

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Posted:
in Mac Software edited January 2014
Does anyone have any opinion's on appleworks?

Compatability with Office, ease of use, quality of product?
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  • Reply 1 of 21
    AppleWorks really has a love-hate reputation. Some people live by it; others can't stant to look at it.



    It's a fantastic small-scale office app. I think most people are just used to MS Word's I-can-do-everything syndrome. It has some great tools built in. There's a word processor, spreadsheet, line art drawing tools, bitmap drawing tools, templates... it's a fine alternative to MS's more expensive Office suite.



    On the down-side, the interface is years old. Launching it harkens back to the OS 8 days with the drab grey controls in places. It doesn't support services (ala the system spell check) and the text is drawn with the old QuickDraw protocol (meaning it's not properly antialiased as in apps like Safari).



    I have little experience with converting to and from Office documents in AppleWorks, but I've read fairly good things about it.
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  • Reply 2 of 21
    lucaluca Posts: 3,833member
    My opinion? If you can get it for free or cheap, go ahead... absolutely do not buy it for whatever it is Apple wants for it. What is it... $90? No way.



    If you want a good word processor without getting anally violated by Microsoft's price for Word, try Mariner Write. It's $80 boxed, $70 as a download, and $140 ($130 downloaded) bundled with the Mariner Calc spreadsheet. These are at www.marinersoftware.com.



    If you're up for messing with X11, you could try getting OpenOffice. Download X11 and OpenOffice from Apple's website, and try it out. It's free.



    I think there's one more Word-alternative... can't remember though.



    Oh yeah, and Appleworks is great for drawing pictures
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  • Reply 3 of 21
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Luca Rescigno

    My opinion? If you can get it for free or cheap, go ahead... absolutely do not buy it for whatever it is Apple wants for it. What is it... $90? No way.



    Well, the student price of US$39 really can't be beat... unless you want to fight with X11 to get the free OpenOffice working properly.



    Though, that Mariner Write looks awfully nice! I'll have to try that later tonight.
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  • Reply 4 of 21
    frank777frank777 Posts: 5,839member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Brad

    On the down-side, the interface is years old. Launching it harkens back to the OS 8 days with the drab grey controls in places. It doesn't support services (ala the system spell check) and the text is drawn with the old QuickDraw protocol (meaning it's not properly antialiased as in apps like Safari).



    This is what is so frustrating about AppleWorks. It has everything needed to be a best-of-class app. The interface could have been fixed relatively easily and so could the Cocoa services and Anti-aliasing support. It's almost like Apple doesn't want it to succeed.



    The conspiracy theory is that Microsoft succeeded in getting them to knife this baby, and the optimist point of view is that Apple doesn't want to tangle with the old code because they been working on something around the corner that will blow us away.



    It's been around the corner for FOUR YEARS NOW (AW 6 was introduced in early 2000.) Jobs had better have a good explaination for this, when the full story becomes known.
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  • Reply 5 of 21
    ionyzionyz Posts: 491member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Frank777

    It's been around the corner for FOUR YEARS NOW (AW 6 was introduced in early 2000.) Jobs had better have a good explaination for this, when the full story becomes known.



    Apple tends to push MS Office very hard. If they have been working on something to tie in with Keynote I'd also love to see it. As it stands the only real need I have for an Office app is to open all the Word/Excel files I receive from co-workers and clients.



    Appleworks falls on its face on some key documents so I installed OpenOffice.org and that was that. The copy/paste deal (control versus command) sucks but it converts documents better then AppleWorks and its free. If I was writing I might use AppleWorks but who knows. It needs a revamp that is for sure.
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  • Reply 6 of 21
    formerlurkerformerlurker Posts: 2,686member
    Well, if you've ever looked closely at the Dock on a display computer at an Apple Store, you won't find AppleWorks, even on eMacs or iBooks which have AppleWorks pre-installed.



    There's your indicator of how important Apple currently considers it.
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  • Reply 7 of 21
    kelibkelib Posts: 740member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Brad





    Though, that Mariner Write looks awfully nice! I'll have to try that later tonight.




    It's only Carbon Won't pay a cent for non Cocoa application. For a very special reason I heavily rely on Cocoa and full Unicode support
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  • Reply 8 of 21
    Quote:

    Originally posted by kelib

    It's only Carbon Won't pay a cent for non Cocoa application. For a very special reason I heavily rely on Cocoa and full Unicode support



    Yeah, I just noticed that too. It looks really nice in the web site's screenshots, but in person it's pretty ugly. Ah, c'est la vie.
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  • Reply 9 of 21
    lucaluca Posts: 3,833member
    Well, there's Mellel, but it's kinda ugly. It is only $29 shareware though, and cocoa.
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  • Reply 10 of 21
    jubelumjubelum Posts: 4,490member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Luca Rescigno



    getting anally violated by Microsoft's.




    that's anally violated WHILE serving time for anti-trust corruption.



    A quick search for "word processor" on VersionTracker turns up a bunch of freeware word processors... the trick is getting MS Orifice-like app integration with different vendors.



    M$FT may suck, but their business model keeps everyone tied down and, um... violated.
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  • Reply 11 of 21
    jbljbl Posts: 555member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Jubelum

    ... the trick is getting MS Orifice-like app integration with different vendors.





    The one thing that is really good about AppleWorks is the integration of the different components. If I, for some reason, need a spread sheet in a word processing document or some such thing, I turn to AppleWorks.
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  • Reply 12 of 21
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Luca Rescigno

    Well, there's Mellel, but it's kinda ugly. It is only $29 shareware though, and cocoa.



    Yeah, I tried Mellel a while ago and liked its functionality but hated the flagrant overuse of brushed metal. I've downloaded a fresh copy, stripped the metal off the main document, and plan to put together some graphics for the elements that are intended to run on metal.



    It's looking better already.







    As a stand-alone word processor, Mellel is pretty good. It doesn't really integrate with much like Word does with the other Office apps or like AppleWorks does with all of its components. There's also no import/export of MS *.doc format.
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  • Reply 13 of 21
    buonrottobuonrotto Posts: 6,368member
    Yikes! Mariner Write looks like a Windows port IMO. It's the toolbar thing, especially how you have to customize it. You know, except for some really tricked out Word stuff which I don't see often, Apple's text frameworks seem pretty nice. I'm using Stone's Create to do resumés and cover letters right now. The things it doesn't have is a "real" header/footer (I created master layers for that purpose, which is actually better), more robust text styles (where you can transfer one complete set of styles to a whole document at a time) and grammar check. Most of this stuff is just part of Apple's text frameworks, though the master layers and the ruler guides I use are part of the specific app. Speaking of which, I wish Apple would make Keynote's rulers and guides standard Cocoa objects. But I digress.
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  • Reply 14 of 21
    addisonaddison Posts: 1,185member
    The biggest downer is that it doesn't spell check as you type and you can't zoom to page width as you can in word. these two issues alone prevent me from using it. Oh and one more thing headers and footers handling is bizzar.
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  • Reply 15 of 21
    jbljbl Posts: 555member
    The nicest looking word processor is Nisus Writer Express. Unfortunately it is currently seriously lacking in functionality. The Nisus people keep promising styles, footnotes and tables sometime "soon."
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  • Reply 16 of 21
    lucaluca Posts: 3,833member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by JBL

    The nicest looking word processor is Nisus Writer Express. Unfortunately it is currently seriously lacking in functionality. The Nisus people keep promising styles, footnotes and tables sometime "soon."



    Ah, that was the one I forgot. Thanks for reminding me. Too bad it can't do that stuff - perhaps for a beginner it would be better, since they wouldn't need those features much anyway. I think I'll at least try Nisus to see what it's like.
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  • Reply 17 of 21
    frank777frank777 Posts: 5,839member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by JBL

    The nicest looking word processor is Nisus Writer Express. Unfortunately it is currently seriously lacking in functionality. The Nisus people keep promising styles, footnotes and tables sometime "soon."



    It could be the nicest looking word processor if their icon-designer visited an optometrist.
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  • Reply 18 of 21
    daverdaver Posts: 496member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Frank777

    It could be the nicest looking word processor if their icon-designer visited an optometrist.



    No kidding. \



    I'm a big fan of Nisus Writer Express otherwise, but without footnote support it's pretty useless for papers. Beautiful interface, though. I wonder what the Omni Group could do with an app like that...
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  • Reply 19 of 21
    frank777frank777 Posts: 5,839member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Daver

    No kidding. \



    I'm a big fan of Nisus Writer Express otherwise, but without footnote support it's pretty useless for papers. Beautiful interface, though. I wonder what the Omni Group could do with an app like that...




    I've always wondered why, with the lead they had with experienced Cocoa programmers, Omni never tackled an Office competitor.



    With Outliner and Graffle, they would have brought a lot to the party.
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  • Reply 20 of 21
    formerlurkerformerlurker Posts: 2,686member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Frank777

    I've always wondered why, with the lead they had with experienced Cocoa programmers, Omni never tackled an Office competitor.

    [/B]





    I'm guessing that an Excel substitute would me downright monumental to program. Although, the long wait for FMP 7 makes me wonder if it won't surpass its current ability to convert an Excel file to a FMP database on the fly. Hey, what is a spreadsheet anyway but a collection of tables?



    The other barrier to coming out with an Office-killer is file format compatibility. AppleWorks currently gets it done by bundling MacLinkPlus translators licensed from DataViz (just as they did waaaay back in the Performa years).
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