CONTENTS
1. INTRODUCTION
2. WORD PROCESSING
3. DRAWING
4. SPREADSHEET, PRESENTATION
&
PAINT
5. DATABASE
6. FILEMAKER PRO
Word Processing
This is the area in which its easiest to find replacements. As far as
new documents are concerned, even TextEdit, when used in Rich Text
mode, will do basic word processing, including the insertion of
images, though with nothing approaching the flexibility of AppleWorks.
Mellel
is powerful and will handle non-Roman texts such as Arabic and Chinese,
Mariner Write offers a reasonable
selection of facilities, and both will
import images in a limited way.
Microsoft
Office is an obvious
choice
because of its widespread use: its word processing section, Word, is
extremely powerful - to the point of being difficult to use because it
provides so many facilities, many of them required only by specialist
users. It's also extremely expensive. (These applications are examined in more detail in my page on '
Abandoning iWork:Pages').
The
free Office programs
OpenOffice.org
and
LibreOffice,
and their close relation
NeoOffice
($15) have similar Word Processing modules which are quite powerful,
though often rather slow. The programs are open-source; stability may occasionally be a problem.
Nisus Writer (left) is
available in Pro and Express versions: the former is probably the best
of the programs I've mentioned for serious use, though it is also the
most expensive (barring MS Office, of course). It has good image import
facilities, and can also draw a wide variety of shapes (although its
facilities in doing so are less than AppleWorks). Unlike most
others it can copy and paste rulers to aid in formatting. The current
version requires El Capitan OSX 10.11 or above, though older versions
remain available available
here.)
However
of these only
LibreOffice
will open Appleworks
Word Processing documents: as long as you can still
open your documents in Appleworks you can always copy and paste, though
complicated formatting is likely not to survive the process. It is
possible to 'Save As' in Appleworks to a handful of MW Word formats,
though I don't know how successful the results are, particularly if the
documents include tables, spreadsheet frames or draw objects.
Otherwise the only
program which can actually open AppleWorks word processing documents is
the older versions of Apple's
Pages (up to version 4 only - however it will not open AppleWorks 5
documents, only Appleworks
6). This is the nearest
thing available to
AppleWorks for drawing and word processing: you can insert pictures and
draw objects, and create complex layouts - indeed a number of
attractive templates are provided (see below, right, for an example).
On
the whole it will open AppleWorks
word processing documents correctly, even when they embed images and
drawings. The text display is better, particularly of small font sizes;
and there are more options for handling images, such as shadows and
reflections.
However
Pages
has now been updated to v7 and this requires High Sierra (10.13); it does not open
Appleworks documents. Earlier versions are no longer
available (the box set of the older iWork may be available from
independent retailers or eBay).
So the following comments apply to Pages 4, not the currently
available version. Most of the functions which are available in
AppleWorks were also
available in Pages 4, though of course one will have to learn different
processes for achieving them: on the whole it's a successful program
and the best option for converting from AppleWorks: its limitations
really only become obvious with very long documents such as complete
books where one would be better off with a more fully featured (and
expensive) program.
However there is one ability missing which may cause problems in some
circumstances: in AppleWorks you can have a document with tabs set up,
and paste text into it while retaining the tab settings and applying
them to the pasted-in text. You can also copy the ruler and apply it
again, so that different ruler settings can be easily used in different
sections of a document.
Neither of these is possible in Pages. If you paste text in, the ruler
defaults to the one-tab-per-centimetre setting, so if you wanted the
text to make use of the previous tab settings you will have to reset
them manually.
The
next page deals with
Draw module.