I see everyone here is focusing on word processing. It seems to me like we already have a ton of choice when it comes to word processors or text editors. What I would like to see is more choice on the spreadsheet front. It is, after all, the second most used office application. Right now, I do not know of a free, fast and light spreadsheet app for Mac OS X that could at least import Excel files and optionally export as the OASIS file format.
Apple should ditch Appleworks. Don't spend any money on that.
Instead... they should devot some cash to shipping all mac's with office or at least word like PC's do.
I bet they could get a better price deal with MS if they did this and they would assure future development because MS would be assured of customers.
Let MS do word processor development.
The reason why Apple should sell Office is multi-fold:
1) More revenue for the comapany that provides us the products we enjoy working with
(more money = better R&D = better end product = happier you and me.
2) MS does not care about making a knockout Apple product.
They only care to make a quick buck off of Mac consumers who, in their eyes, are not ever going to need a full-featured office app. Their ad campaign even reflects this. MS' whole thing is to sell Windows AND Office. They would do better to have you think that you can only use a MAc if you also won a PC (with the idea that the Mac is okay, but to do "real business", you need a PC). And if that line doesn't work, well, hey, at least you will buy Office, right? Well, it is working for MS, but you and I are losing out, because the products lack not only polish,but features as well.
3) Lack of Polish, lack of features.
MS OFfice for Mac does not employ the Apple design philosophy to keep a high-powered app easy to use, or just plain look nice. Also, Office for MAc lakc many features that the PC version has, not the least of which is robustxml support.
4) Security.
One of the most severe security concerns this year came as a result of what?...
Having MS Excel installed on your Mac.
What are the plusses of "AppleOffice". I can think of way too many. As far as compatibility with MS OFFice for PC, that is not the huge hurdle MS would have you believe. Hey, even OpenOffice gives you almost perfect compatibility across the board (with some formatting issues in some cases). An Apple branded Office would definitely be a couple steps up from Open.
Maybe I'm in the overwhelming minority here, but I think Microsoft Office for Mac is pretty decent. I have to run, but one feature of the MS Office: Mac 2004 (and previous versions, I believe) that Office for Windows doesn't have (AFAIK) is the "driving time" thing in Entourage. That's a nifty little feature and very helpful. No, it's not the most beautiful thing in the world and it really should be, but... sometimes sacrifices have to be made, I guess.
I would love to ditch Office on my system if I could find a viable alternative...
Replacement options:
Entourage = iCal / Mail / Address Book / Stickies
Word = ?
Excel = ?
PowerPoint = Keynote
And please don't bring up OpenOffice... it's slow and looks worse than Office on Mac OS X. It has a way to go...
I see everyone here is focusing on word processing. It seems to me like we already have a ton of choice when it comes to word processors or text editors. What I would like to see is more choice on the spreadsheet front. It is, after all, the second most used office application. Right now, I do not know of a free, fast and light spreadsheet app for Mac OS X that could at least import Excel files and optionally export as the OASIS file format.
Bingo. Give the man a prize!
The lack of a spreadsheet app is a huge problem.
As usual, I know nothing about app development. Does anybody know if any of Apple's under-the-hood APIs address the spreadsheet market?
Seems to me that a basic spreadsheet shouldn't take long to code in Cocoa at all. The problems would be the extensive formulas and macros. Entry-level users wouldn't miss most of those.
If Apple Office comes to pass I hope they do a nice job of the charting capabilities of the spreadsheet program. Keynotes features in this regard are bare bones. I've never warmed to Exel's charting functions.
I also hope they keep the database portion of Appleworks, I use it for a number of things around the lab for which Filemaker is just too much to bother with.
It seems that part of what is restraining Apple is the relationship with MS. Apple needs MS Office in order to be accepted in some places. If Apple makes a product that competes too well with MS Office then it might be withdrawn and Apple will lose sales as a result. This may be the reason we haven't seen more development of Keynote and it may be the reason that AW has languished.
Nevertheless, Apple should revamp AW and upgrade Keynote though they'll have to walk a fine line. After all, AW is fine for schools and homes and these markets don't threaten MS much. Keynote alone would not threaten PP.
Apart from that Apple should rethink the whole "Works" concept. This idea goes back something like fifteen years or more. If the OS took the desktop metaphor a 'works suite provided the standard tools you needed at the office.
Times have changed. Word processing has changed. Many documents are now unformatted text. Others have gone higher end into page layout territory. It would be interesting if Apple would come out with a new app suite after rethinking what people need.
For example, maybe they could dress up email. You could compose a simple layout with text and images and email that as html. Or you could compose a simple video message with your iSight camera, overlay a little text or doodling, compress it with AVC, and email that to friends. 5 MB over broadband is tolerable. Or you might just send the link and post the video on your website.
The new iChat looks good as it allows multi-person v-chats. If Apple would make it easy to share files at the same time or have a white board that everyone could write on together we could have a great collaboration platform.
Perhaps another app for the suite would be iOrganize. When the first office suites came out files were stored on floppy disks in shoe boxes. Now we keep everything on the HD. Something less formal than a database but more useful than simple folders would be useful for many people (at home and at school) to keep things usefully sorted. Maybe it could be based on the login metaphor. It needn't even be an app. Tiger could be expanded to have "contexts" as well as users. When you specify your math class context then all of your recent work is available and new work is stored there as well. When you change to your history class context it all changes. It could even use the cubic transition like multiple users does now. Contexts might just be different folders in your home documents folder.
Apple doesn't have to do all of this. If they lay the foundations in OS X then other developers could build on that. For example, if Apple developed iOrganize with multiple work spaces then OmniOutliner, Mariner Calc, Tex-Edit Plus and such could be enhanced to work with that. It would be a plus for both Apple and the third party vendors, even MS.
I don't think Apple would need to create a e-mail program. Mail is pretty powerful. And so is iCal and Address Book. Instead, Apple should create a central management app that organizes all your different data from these apps. Something similar to this...
All they need is to create the word processor and spreadsheet applications. Then simply integrate them with Keynote and Filemaker. Throw in this CRM application and...
i think a good deal of the compitition between MS and Apple can be dealt with the way they present the new software. If they call it Appleworks, then its just an upgrade to something that has been around a long time, but if they call it Apple Office and Steve goes on about it being an Office-killer-then we know the gloves are off. Again, the new word processor can be sold as an alternative to Word or an alternative to Quark and InDesign -the light version.
How things are presented will make a big difference in how the press picks it up and what the headlines state.
I dunno, just because MS has both an OS and an Office suite under the same banner doesn't mean that a productitivty suite is supposed to be made by the OS vendor. Ms came to that situation by happenstance, wanting to own the whole ball of wax.
Oh, I don't know about that. AppleWorks (the original one!) was bundled with my Apple //c, and the Mac came with MacWrite, MacDraw, etc.
It's a simple consequence of the fact that word processors and computers have gone hand in glove for decades. They were bundled as soon as it became economical to bundle them (spreadsheets followed later only because they were much more difficult and demanding than contemporary word processors).
Quote:
If MS made Pagemaker or Quark instead, people might expect a layout app to come from the OS maker and not a spreadsheet.
Funny you should mention that. MS does make a DTP app—Publisher—but hardly anyone uses it. Most of the calls I've seen for Apple to make a DTP app have come from enraged Quark users.
But I agree that the focus should not merely be on word processors. What's needed is a replacement for AppleWorks, which is (or was...) a simple, elegant, well-integrated package that did everything that most people needed it to do, free with the computer they purchased (and cheap if purchased separately).
How long has Apple been not-so-covertly asking their developers to develop a spreadsheet for OS X?
A very long time. That's not the only place where they prod would-be developers in the direction of a spreadsheet.
But there are some out there. They're not used because the first thing anyone's going to ask is, "is it compatible with Excel?" If you've seen the proprietary, obscurantist (and at this point, patented) crap that Excel spits out, this is a lethal question.
The people who use Excel tend to push it really hard. If you tell them that they can't just import the giant linked mass of spreadsheets that run their annual reports and expect it to work and work fast, then it doesn't matter how pretty your app is. Hardly anyone will use it. Given the tremendous amount of work that would be required to field a decent spreadsheet, even with the shortcuts Cocoa provides (and which I'm not sure scale well enough to match Excel, frankly) I don't think most people consider it worth the trouble.
Core Data makes things interesting, because a spreadsheet is basically just a funky view of a database that happens to have a lot of built-in functions, and Core Data is a database. So writing a credible spreadsheet app might get easier. Unless Apple pulls a rabbit out of a hat, though, the toughest part would still be Excel file compatibility. MS has the market by the short hairs, and they know it.
I understand that file compatibility with Excel is a major problem.
But I distinctly remember when Microsoft introduced the List Manager feature in Office v. X, they said that 90% of their spreadsheet users used Excel to make simple lists. This is from Microsoft themselves.
So why hasn't Omni or Mellel or Nisus ever written a spreadsheet app for this huge base of low end users? It doesn't seem like it would take that much time, and would at least add significant value to their Word Processor package.
I for one, never do more than simple calculations in my spreadsheets, which is mostly small business budgeting and task/project management done in AppleWorks 6.
So they use Word because it integrates with Excel, and they use Excel because it integrates with Word, and they use both because they have proprietary file formats that no one else can read.
That's called 'lock-in', not choice.
CoreData should make this much more interesting, allowing multiple applications to work with each others' data very easily and smoothly. So much for single-vendor integration.
The file formats are the biggest problem right now, but the OpenOffice folks (and the other projects like that) are making good headway in that arena.
Combine the above two, and you can take one app from Omnigroup, another from Apple, and a third from Stone, and make your own Office suite tailored to your needs.
Yeah, I don't know about that either, hence the very non-committal language. Again, playing devil's advocate. Honestly, I think the general idea of a productivity suite is, at this point, a basic requirement of a modern computer right out of the box.
However, I think Apple probably should do their own thing within that basic parameter, e.g., make it more graphics savvy, maybe make it more web savvy too. Certainly some sort of database tool is important. As others say, I don't think they could even come close to making an Excel killer, not with Excel's position in the market and the situation under its hood. I think a better approach would be to say, OK, we need something out of the box on our machines that handles people's letters, bills, all the mundane things we expect our computers to help us with. Go from there. I just wouldn't want to see Apple take a me-too approach to such a suite.
Kickaha: trying to wrap my brain around CoreData. Does it potentially fulfill a kind of services- or clipboard-on-steroids wish? I know I've wished for something to that effect before, but I didn't think that CoreData was really related to any such idea.
So they use Word because it integrates with Excel, and they use Excel because it integrates with Word, and they use both because they have proprietary file formats that no one else can read.
That's called 'lock-in', not choice.
CoreData should make this much more interesting, allowing multiple applications to work with each others' data very easily and smoothly. So much for single-vendor integration.
The file formats are the biggest problem right now, but the OpenOffice folks (and the other projects like that) are making good headway in that arena.
Combine the above two, and you can take one app from Omnigroup, another from Apple, and a third from Stone, and make your own Office suite tailored to your needs.
Historically, Microsoft leveraged MS Excel to give MS Office its dominant position among office productivity suites. The other major app in the suite, MS Word, was an also-ran among WinDOS word processors. By bundling Word with Excel in the same box, MS vaulted Word into its current dominant position on the Windows platform. From there, the product is now considered by many to be essential to success in the enterprise market.
But I distinctly remember when Microsoft introduced the List Manager feature in Office v. X, they said that 90% of their spreadsheet users used Excel to make simple lists. This is from Microsoft themselves.
So why hasn't Omni or Mellel or Nisus ever written a spreadsheet app for this huge base of low end users? It doesn't seem like it would take that much time, and would at least add significant value to their Word Processor package.
Mariner has Calc, and there is this (Mesa Spreadsheet, which is decent. Compatibility with Excel files is better now. One major lack on the Mac side is adequate scripting comparable to VBA (AppleScript doesn't fit the bill).
Since I work in Excel 2002 on Win 2000 all day, for me the biggest draw back for widescale adoption of an alternative to XL is VBA. The VBA shipped with Office 2004 (which I have at home) is 10% of the VBA capabilities on the Windows side. So also ActiveX controls, which Mac OS doesn't support. Thus, even for cross-platform development within just the Excel "family" there is a vast difference. And while 99% of the people in my department don't use/know about VBA, they have to be able to read the results of what I produce in VBA.
One note: AppleScript *CAN* fit the bill, easily, if the developer chooses to add robust support for it. MS chooses not to.
To some extent. Rick Schaut (works in MS MacBU) has interesting comments on his weblog concerning the integration of MS Office into the Mac environment and the challenges they face.
Another possibility, but I haven't looked at it for 18 months or so, is Thinkfree Office
Comments
Instead... they should devot some cash to shipping all mac's with office or at least word like PC's do.
I bet they could get a better price deal with MS if they did this and they would assure future development because MS would be assured of customers.
Let MS do word processor development.
Originally posted by salmonstk
Apple should ditch Appleworks. Don't spend any money on that.
Instead... they should devot some cash to shipping all mac's with office or at least word like PC's do.
I bet they could get a better price deal with MS if they did this and they would assure future development because MS would be assured of customers.
Let MS do word processor development.
The reason why Apple should sell Office is multi-fold:
1) More revenue for the comapany that provides us the products we enjoy working with
(more money = better R&D = better end product = happier you and me.
2) MS does not care about making a knockout Apple product.
They only care to make a quick buck off of Mac consumers who, in their eyes, are not ever going to need a full-featured office app. Their ad campaign even reflects this. MS' whole thing is to sell Windows AND Office. They would do better to have you think that you can only use a MAc if you also won a PC (with the idea that the Mac is okay, but to do "real business", you need a PC). And if that line doesn't work, well, hey, at least you will buy Office, right? Well, it is working for MS, but you and I are losing out, because the products lack not only polish,but features as well.
3) Lack of Polish, lack of features.
MS OFfice for Mac does not employ the Apple design philosophy to keep a high-powered app easy to use, or just plain look nice. Also, Office for MAc lakc many features that the PC version has, not the least of which is robustxml support.
4) Security.
One of the most severe security concerns this year came as a result of what?...
Having MS Excel installed on your Mac.
What are the plusses of "AppleOffice". I can think of way too many. As far as compatibility with MS OFFice for PC, that is not the huge hurdle MS would have you believe. Hey, even OpenOffice gives you almost perfect compatibility across the board (with some formatting issues in some cases). An Apple branded Office would definitely be a couple steps up from Open.
What are the negatives?
MS is upset (cue violin).
I would love to ditch Office on my system if I could find a viable alternative...
Replacement options:
Entourage = iCal / Mail / Address Book / Stickies
Word = ?
Excel = ?
PowerPoint = Keynote
And please don't bring up OpenOffice... it's slow and looks worse than Office on Mac OS X. It has a way to go...
Originally posted by Boukman
I see everyone here is focusing on word processing. It seems to me like we already have a ton of choice when it comes to word processors or text editors. What I would like to see is more choice on the spreadsheet front. It is, after all, the second most used office application. Right now, I do not know of a free, fast and light spreadsheet app for Mac OS X that could at least import Excel files and optionally export as the OASIS file format.
Bingo. Give the man a prize!
The lack of a spreadsheet app is a huge problem.
As usual, I know nothing about app development. Does anybody know if any of Apple's under-the-hood APIs address the spreadsheet market?
Seems to me that a basic spreadsheet shouldn't take long to code in Cocoa at all. The problems would be the extensive formulas and macros. Entry-level users wouldn't miss most of those.
I also hope they keep the database portion of Appleworks, I use it for a number of things around the lab for which Filemaker is just too much to bother with.
Nevertheless, Apple should revamp AW and upgrade Keynote though they'll have to walk a fine line. After all, AW is fine for schools and homes and these markets don't threaten MS much. Keynote alone would not threaten PP.
Apart from that Apple should rethink the whole "Works" concept. This idea goes back something like fifteen years or more. If the OS took the desktop metaphor a 'works suite provided the standard tools you needed at the office.
Times have changed. Word processing has changed. Many documents are now unformatted text. Others have gone higher end into page layout territory. It would be interesting if Apple would come out with a new app suite after rethinking what people need.
For example, maybe they could dress up email. You could compose a simple layout with text and images and email that as html. Or you could compose a simple video message with your iSight camera, overlay a little text or doodling, compress it with AVC, and email that to friends. 5 MB over broadband is tolerable. Or you might just send the link and post the video on your website.
The new iChat looks good as it allows multi-person v-chats. If Apple would make it easy to share files at the same time or have a white board that everyone could write on together we could have a great collaboration platform.
Perhaps another app for the suite would be iOrganize. When the first office suites came out files were stored on floppy disks in shoe boxes. Now we keep everything on the HD. Something less formal than a database but more useful than simple folders would be useful for many people (at home and at school) to keep things usefully sorted. Maybe it could be based on the login metaphor. It needn't even be an app. Tiger could be expanded to have "contexts" as well as users. When you specify your math class context then all of your recent work is available and new work is stored there as well. When you change to your history class context it all changes. It could even use the cubic transition like multiple users does now. Contexts might just be different folders in your home documents folder.
Apple doesn't have to do all of this. If they lay the foundations in OS X then other developers could build on that. For example, if Apple developed iOrganize with multiple work spaces then OmniOutliner, Mariner Calc, Tex-Edit Plus and such could be enhanced to work with that. It would be a plus for both Apple and the third party vendors, even MS.
http://www.crm4mac.com/
All they need is to create the word processor and spreadsheet applications. Then simply integrate them with Keynote and Filemaker. Throw in this CRM application and...
Voila!
You got yourself a powerful Apple Office.
Mike
How things are presented will make a big difference in how the press picks it up and what the headlines state.
Originally posted by BuonRotto
I dunno, just because MS has both an OS and an Office suite under the same banner doesn't mean that a productitivty suite is supposed to be made by the OS vendor. Ms came to that situation by happenstance, wanting to own the whole ball of wax.
Oh, I don't know about that. AppleWorks (the original one!) was bundled with my Apple //c, and the Mac came with MacWrite, MacDraw, etc.
It's a simple consequence of the fact that word processors and computers have gone hand in glove for decades. They were bundled as soon as it became economical to bundle them (spreadsheets followed later only because they were much more difficult and demanding than contemporary word processors).
If MS made Pagemaker or Quark instead, people might expect a layout app to come from the OS maker and not a spreadsheet.
Funny you should mention that. MS does make a DTP app—Publisher—but hardly anyone uses it. Most of the calls I've seen for Apple to make a DTP app have come from enraged Quark users.
But I agree that the focus should not merely be on word processors. What's needed is a replacement for AppleWorks, which is (or was...) a simple, elegant, well-integrated package that did everything that most people needed it to do, free with the computer they purchased (and cheap if purchased separately).
Read the very first line of the very first paragraph.
How long has Apple been not-so-covertly asking their developers to develop a spreadsheet for OS X?
Originally posted by Frank777
How long has Apple been not-so-covertly asking their developers to develop a spreadsheet for OS X?
A very long time. That's not the only place where they prod would-be developers in the direction of a spreadsheet.
But there are some out there. They're not used because the first thing anyone's going to ask is, "is it compatible with Excel?" If you've seen the proprietary, obscurantist (and at this point, patented) crap that Excel spits out, this is a lethal question.
The people who use Excel tend to push it really hard. If you tell them that they can't just import the giant linked mass of spreadsheets that run their annual reports and expect it to work and work fast, then it doesn't matter how pretty your app is. Hardly anyone will use it. Given the tremendous amount of work that would be required to field a decent spreadsheet, even with the shortcuts Cocoa provides (and which I'm not sure scale well enough to match Excel, frankly) I don't think most people consider it worth the trouble.
Core Data makes things interesting, because a spreadsheet is basically just a funky view of a database that happens to have a lot of built-in functions, and Core Data is a database. So writing a credible spreadsheet app might get easier. Unless Apple pulls a rabbit out of a hat, though, the toughest part would still be Excel file compatibility. MS has the market by the short hairs, and they know it.
But I distinctly remember when Microsoft introduced the List Manager feature in Office v. X, they said that 90% of their spreadsheet users used Excel to make simple lists. This is from Microsoft themselves.
So why hasn't Omni or Mellel or Nisus ever written a spreadsheet app for this huge base of low end users? It doesn't seem like it would take that much time, and would at least add significant value to their Word Processor package.
I for one, never do more than simple calculations in my spreadsheets, which is mostly small business budgeting and task/project management done in AppleWorks 6.
Mike
That's called 'lock-in', not choice.
CoreData should make this much more interesting, allowing multiple applications to work with each others' data very easily and smoothly. So much for single-vendor integration.
The file formats are the biggest problem right now, but the OpenOffice folks (and the other projects like that) are making good headway in that arena.
Combine the above two, and you can take one app from Omnigroup, another from Apple, and a third from Stone, and make your own Office suite tailored to your needs.
Originally posted by Amorph
Oh, I don't know about that.
Yeah, I don't know about that either, hence the very non-committal language.
However, I think Apple probably should do their own thing within that basic parameter, e.g., make it more graphics savvy, maybe make it more web savvy too. Certainly some sort of database tool is important. As others say, I don't think they could even come close to making an Excel killer, not with Excel's position in the market and the situation under its hood. I think a better approach would be to say, OK, we need something out of the box on our machines that handles people's letters, bills, all the mundane things we expect our computers to help us with. Go from there. I just wouldn't want to see Apple take a me-too approach to such a suite.
Kickaha: trying to wrap my brain around CoreData. Does it potentially fulfill a kind of services- or clipboard-on-steroids wish? I know I've wished for something to that effect before, but I didn't think that CoreData was really related to any such idea.
Originally posted by Kickaha
So they use Word because it integrates with Excel, and they use Excel because it integrates with Word, and they use both because they have proprietary file formats that no one else can read.
That's called 'lock-in', not choice.
CoreData should make this much more interesting, allowing multiple applications to work with each others' data very easily and smoothly. So much for single-vendor integration.
The file formats are the biggest problem right now, but the OpenOffice folks (and the other projects like that) are making good headway in that arena.
Combine the above two, and you can take one app from Omnigroup, another from Apple, and a third from Stone, and make your own Office suite tailored to your needs.
Historically, Microsoft leveraged MS Excel to give MS Office its dominant position among office productivity suites. The other major app in the suite, MS Word, was an also-ran among WinDOS word processors. By bundling Word with Excel in the same box, MS vaulted Word into its current dominant position on the Windows platform. From there, the product is now considered by many to be essential to success in the enterprise market.
But I distinctly remember when Microsoft introduced the List Manager feature in Office v. X, they said that 90% of their spreadsheet users used Excel to make simple lists. This is from Microsoft themselves.
So why hasn't Omni or Mellel or Nisus ever written a spreadsheet app for this huge base of low end users? It doesn't seem like it would take that much time, and would at least add significant value to their Word Processor package.
Mariner has Calc, and there is this (Mesa Spreadsheet, which is decent. Compatibility with Excel files is better now. One major lack on the Mac side is adequate scripting comparable to VBA (AppleScript doesn't fit the bill).
Since I work in Excel 2002 on Win 2000 all day, for me the biggest draw back for widescale adoption of an alternative to XL is VBA. The VBA shipped with Office 2004 (which I have at home) is 10% of the VBA capabilities on the Windows side. So also ActiveX controls, which Mac OS doesn't support. Thus, even for cross-platform development within just the Excel "family" there is a vast difference. And while 99% of the people in my department don't use/know about VBA, they have to be able to read the results of what I produce in VBA.
Originally posted by Kickaha
One note: AppleScript *CAN* fit the bill, easily, if the developer chooses to add robust support for it. MS chooses not to.
To some extent. Rick Schaut (works in MS MacBU) has interesting comments on his weblog concerning the integration of MS Office into the Mac environment and the challenges they face.
Another possibility, but I haven't looked at it for 18 months or so, is Thinkfree Office