Appleworks spreadsheet question

Posted:
in Mac Software edited January 2014
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

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 8
    ybotybot Posts: 329member
    I found AppleWorks to be so lacking in comparison to Microsoft Office for the Mac that I ended up switching to Office v.X. I don't think AppleWorks has auto-complete; at least, I couldn't find it.
  • Reply 2 of 8
    firehcfirehc Posts: 368member
    can i work on multiple worksheet in appleworks like excel?

    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?
  • Reply 3 of 8
    torifiletorifile Posts: 4,024member
    Just save yourself the heartache and switch to office v.x. AW is just a joke in comparison. Anything more than just writing a simple word processing document is more trouble than it's worth. Or, you can struggle along with it until AW 7 comes out. Hopefully that'll be better. Of course office is a pricey package if you don't qualify for an ed discount or an upgrade discount. So, take that for what it's worth...
  • Reply 4 of 8
    ybotybot Posts: 329member
    [quote]Originally posted by torifile:

    <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!
  • Reply 5 of 8
    thoth2thoth2 Posts: 277member
    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
  • Reply 6 of 8
    ybotybot Posts: 329member
    [quote]Originally posted by Thoth2:

    <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>
  • Reply 7 of 8
    neutrino23neutrino23 Posts: 1,561member
    The spreadsheet in AW is quite simple. It is OK for simple things but not much more. It hasn't changed much in a long time.



    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.
  • Reply 8 of 8
    jbljbl Posts: 555member
    I have tried both Mariner and Mesa. Mesa looks nicer and has a lot of the more advanced functions from Excel (like database functions). Unfortunately it seems incomplete. It is missing a lot of more basic functions like transpose. Hopefully they will fill in the holes sometime soon. Mariner has some quirks and seems less ambicious but it is more complete. Neither has autocomplete. I am not sure what is so exciting about autocomplete that I would buy Excel just for that.



    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>;
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