So, I’m still fooling around with my new Mac: ripping CDs into iTunes, editing old videos with iMovie, getting to know both 9.2 and X…

One of these days I will be actually using my computer for *productive* work like spreadsheets and documents. I have a bunch of Excel and Word files that I will soon need to access. I want to give AppleWorks a go, but would like to get some pros and cons of both apps.

I was going to go with Office:Mac for one reason only. And that is that I could sync my Palm contacts into Entourage. But, since I like X’s mail app, I might wait around until I see if there are other options to get my contacts into that application. Thoughts there as well?

Thanks.

I can’t address the Palm issues, but here goes the rest. 

I love Office 98 and Office 2001.  I should say that I love Word 98 and Word 2001.  I don’t use Excel for very much, I loathe PowerPoint, and I don’t use Entourage. 

I also think that AppleWorks is a great application, especially for the price.  I haven’t tested AppleWorks’ ability to open Word files of late, but perhaps someone else can address that.  At the very least, AppleWorks with MacLink Plus Deluxe will get the job done.

Another option is the standalone Word/Entourage package from MS.

Nisus Writer and Z-Write are two other great Mac word processors (each with a different purpose).

Yeah, I could do without PowerPoint myself. I don’t use Excel too much either, but do have spreadsheets. Word and Outlook are what I had been using previously. Outlook worked great with the Palm and I’m sure Entourage would also.

I would just prefer to use X’s Mail and have a good word processor with occasional spreadsheet ability. AppleWorks sounds like it would work for that. How would you compare Word with the AppleWorks composition app?

How about Mail? Outlook is better than Outlook Express, but do you think that Entourage (Office X version) will be better than X’s mail?

As much as I can’t stand the company, I can recognize a great piece of software when I use it, and Office 2001 is one of the finest I have ever seen.  I anyone isn’t sure about Entourage, check it out.  It does everything Outlook did, and adds the most killer Address Book on any email program.  I use Excel and Word constantly for HTML because they export such great code (not the most elegant, but very compatable) for any quick page that I don’t want to fire up GoLive for.  If you want to insert a link into any Office document, it will farm out to Internet Explorer’s favorites automatically, of you can open the window and drag-and-drop them into place.
Office 2001 is MS’s best app, far better than the PC version.

what? word 2001 good? no, you can’t possibly be serious. that overcomplex piece of bloatware don’t float my boat. i haven’t used the wp in appleworks since i still use wordperfect - which suits me fine - it displays my text correctly - i can place tables and image files without disrupting the formatting. In fact i can do just about everything i need to. given that i am scientist and not a journalist, that may not be to much relatively speaking.

however, the opposite is true for excel, which i think is the best thing that m$ have ever allowed to be written. it IS good. some things annoy and in ways the 98 version is a little better… but it is WAY better than the appleworks one.

as for entourage - yes it is good to sync with my palm - surely something will come for mail or something soon… but i find it’s functionality lacking - stupid things like a tiny delete button placed next to a large print button… there are loads of stupid ergono-errors to coin a term that i wish i could use mail all the time - though that is a bit limited and i can’t really use X at work yet…

regards
adam cooper
UK

I no longer use Office at home (and rarely at work) because I like to stay in X as much as possible.  I find the 6.2 (6.1.2 for OS 9.x) extremely usable.  This update opens and saves Word and Excel files very well in my experience.  You may have to get used to a few changes if you are expeerienced with MS products:  many of the “helpful” little aspects of Word are set up a little differently in AppleWorks.  I find I actually prefer to have to ask the software to spell check for me than to constantly tell Word’s little assistant to leave me alone.

My $0.02.

On 2001-08-24 10:41, Anonymous wrote:
As much as I can’t stand the company, I can recognize a great piece of software when I use it, and Office 2001 is one of the finest I have ever seen.

Don’t get out much, do you?

Word is bloatware that uses triple pointers in C spaghetti code (according to a friend who used to work at M$ and started on the Office suite). Call me whacky, call me kooky, but I’ve always felt that when you need *double* pointers, 99% of the time you are better off rewriting the code.

Personally, I get along quite fine with Acrobat and plain text.

Office 2001 is MS’s best app, far better than the PC version.

True, but that is grading on a curve.

I have often read bad reviews on MS Office 2001. I must tell you: they are all wrong. I use Office every day here, most of the time Word, which works GREAT in all respects, very often Entourage (whenever I read mails and news, actually), sometimes Excel, and seldom Powerpoint. These apps just rock. They offer everything you can wish for and combine it with the Mac’s look and feel. Office is very stable. It only crashes when I open that little animated assistant, but I don’t like it anyway. That much for Office.

As for AW, well… it is good enough for the small tasks like writing a short letter here and there. But for serious tasks AW is just bad. No functions to navigate in large documents, no indexes, no table of contents, nothing.
I don’t know the spreadsheet functions in AW. The presentation module, however, sucks big time and is only suitable for simple slideshows.

C. Meermann
.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

Office for the Mac is nice to an extent.  But when it comes to how much Microsoft opens you up to viruses, you begin to wonder if it really is worth spending 4 times as much as Appleworks, Eudora, and Action Now Up-To-Date/Contact combined to get the same functionality.  Already Appleworks and Eudora are Mac OS X native, and work great in X.  I just had the fun of trying to export 30,000 messages to Eudora.  And you know what happened?  My Entourage trash box overflowed and I had to recover from my backup since no amount of tinkering would empty that mailbox.  The problem?  Entourage stores all its mail in one single file!  Eudora separates the files by folder.  So at least then if something got corrupted it would be easy to remove.  For Microsoft Entourage is very nice, yes.  But it can’t beat the cost of Eudora and Action Now combined.  Even at $150 with Word it won’t give you the free upgrade to X version.  Eudora and Now will.  And Eudora is hundreds of times faster than Entourage if you are searching for words inside hundreds of mailboxes.  You’d think Entourage could be faster since it is all in one file!  I say thank you very much, but I can get all of Office for $380 less, and still buy Maclinkplus for $100, and still have $45 for GraphicConverter and still have $235 left over.  What more could you want? 

Appleworks is fine for almost any use. The spreadsheet does all that you could need except macros. And who writes macros for spreadsheets.  No MS SW under any circumstance.

Word is an annoyance. For 99% of home users, AW is fine. Not the most elegant software, but very usable. Word has an annoying habit of trying to tell me what I want to do. Even if I don’t want to do that, particularly with formatting tasks, even simple ones! I’d take AW any day at home.

Office is a *powerful* program. Powerful = Complex. I have no desire or need for complexity at home. At work, yes. Style sheets, linear programming, limited simulation, and compatible presentations pretty much require the sophistication and power of Office. At home, I don’t want the headaches that come with all that power.

There are few people in the world that need all the esoteric features, or even programs that Office offers. So why spend the several hundreds of dollars?? AW now opens and saves to Word or Excel and has the features 95% of us will ever need or use, at a fraction of the cost.

Of course, there are people who actually do need those fancy features, and happen to have the money….

Well, We are using office 2001 home and at work I have used the windows verson (2000) and the mac. Generally 2001 has a spotty implementation of drag and drop.
Some times you can and sometimes you can’t pasting or draging urls for instance sometimes they pop up as hyperlinks and sometimes you have to send them before they are converted draging a link in from navigator seldom works(but seems to sometimes)
  entourage is really great it is easy to configure for multiple pop accounts the only problem i have been having is some files it compresses dont open easily on the windows side of the email i’m not certain if its just really dumb windows users.and im still not clear if every body in the family can have thier own calendar. The address book is really a help with powerfull sorting and group mailing features. If it had an aqua interface i would be in heavin
Word 2000 is a joy pretty much.  the template save needs some work (IT will not fax headers only body text after the document is saved as a template annoying if you want your company stationary to fax.) the new floating format pallattes are great,all those wierd tools are better organized.
It does html pretty well but in typical Gatesian style certain html features are only able to be read by internet exploder (a program I just hate to use on principal)
powerpoint timing and features are not well implemented in the windows mac cross over environment i wouldny want to make a presentation on the mac and burn it in toast pop in in a local pc and count on it to work as if my job depended on it.  The sound narration features are at best ragged.
  the big hole in office is the lack of Access to make relational data bases that (hopefully ) would function cross platform.(with out importing tabbed dbf files) not that Access is such a great program (except as a narcotic sleep aid) but if you buy the top of the line office for windows you get it…On the mac side you have to shell out for filemaker pro.The problems start if you want to publish your data base on the average web host lots of tech support for msdb but low understanding of file maker or macs.Although filemaker is easier to use it has its limitations (relational databases are like almost an afterthought) they act as if golive does not exist front page or nothing

Appleworks is fine for a funky low tech quickie get the job done type of use (a cd data base for instance,) but its record sorting and search engine is rough and theres really not a good way to make a query form in it (the rolidex metafor is not good for thousands of records)
if i didnt have Photoshop and illustrator and painter i would use the drawing and layout programs) it is a great start to learn about these types of professonal programs.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: otaojones on 2001-08-25 00:57 ]</font>