Appleworks spreadsheet question
I'm doing my utmost to stay away from all micro$oft products of all types, except for at work where I am forced ( ) to use NT on a PII w/ 128mb of ram. Man is that a dog. Anyway, I have started to use Appleworks instead of Office. So far, everything I need is there, but I can't figure out how to get autocomplete to work. Is it available in Appleworks? Maybe its called something different (I couldn't find a relevant topic in the help file) so I'll describe what I want: within a column, when I type in an entry that I have already typed in in another cell above, I want the new cell to predict what I am typing and autocomplete the entry like excel does. Can I do this?
Thoth
Thoth
Comments
i am a new user, just trying to convert the old files to appleworks, but can't insert worksheet?
or have to go to the office X?
<strong>Just save yourself the heartache and switch to office v.x.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Exactly! AppleWorks is for novice/home/consumer/education users who don't need power-features like Auto-complete. Microsoft Office v.X is scalable in it's sense that it can do everything AppleWorks can, but it can also easily handle high-end tasks and more complicated operations. I'd second the recommendation to Office v.X, you won't be dissapointed!
Thanks for the info.
Thoth
<strong>It hurts me to no end to hear that AW is so inferior to a M$ product. I can probably still get the edu discount (I have friends...) but that's still $199ish (?) in Billy's pockets. I'll have to do some soul searching...
Thanks for the info.
Thoth</strong><hr></blockquote>
AppleWorks and Office v.X are not competing products. They were never intended to be. Think of AppleWorks as a light version of Office. If you don't expect it to do everything Office can, you'll be fine with it, if you need more robust features, then you need to step up to Office v.X.
[ 03-08-2002: Message edited by: Ybot ]</p>
Two others you might look at are Mariner and Mesa - both should be on version tracker and both run on OS X. Mariner is cheaper. Both can open xls files. However, I haven't tried it with very complicated files. I wouldn't be surprised if there were some special trick that xcel did that these can't. For the most part they should be OK. They support multiple work sheets, different currency units and such.
Don't know about auto-complete. That is a feature that really annoys me. Whenever I have to use a wintel box I always waste ten minutes digging around trying to figure out how to turn it off.
You do have one other option. You can run gnumeric under X-windows. I have only spent a few minutes playing with gnumeric but it looks like it has almost everything Excel has (unlike either Mesa or Mariner it has a full set of statistical functions for example). I have been meaning to set up X-windows on this machine but I haven't gotten around to it. If you are interested, check out <a href="http://fink.sourceforge.net/" target="_blank">http://fink.sourceforge.net/</a>