CONTENTS
1. INTRODUCTION
2. WORD PROCESSING
3. DRAWING
4. SPREADSHEET, PRESENTATION
&
PAINT
5. DATABASE
6. FILEMAKER PRO
Spreadsheets
Though not having the power of
Excel, the industry standard, the
spreadsheet module in Appleworks is reasonably powerful, with a good
range of calculation functions. If you simply copy the contents of your
sheet
and paste it into another program such as Excel you will lose all
calculations - calculation fields will show the
current result only, so you would have to set up all the calculations
again, but you will have better success by exporting to Excel format
(see below). The free Office programs
OpenOffice.org,
its close relation
NeoOffice,
and a more recent version
LibreOffice, all have Spreadsheet modules with a
reasonable range of functions. There are two useful spreadsheet
programs,
Tables and
Mesa,
which have more limited functionality but are easy to use and suitable
for all but the more complex requirements. (These are examined in more detail in my page on '
Abandoning iWork:Numbers'.)
Of these, only
LibreOffice
will open AppleWorks spreadsheets directly (some adjustments may be
necessary after doing so). Only the older versions of Apple's 'Numbers'
will open
AppleWorks spreadsheets directly, including calculations and headers
and footers.
It has slightly fewer calculation functions, so
if you are using any of the more obscure functions they may not work.
The calculation syntax is similar to AppleWorks, and functions can be
inserted from a list.
However Numbers has now been updated to
v5.3 - High Sierra required
- and this does not open AppleWorks spreadsheets. The older version is
no longer available from Apple (it may be possible to find the boxed
iWork set in independent retailers or Ebay.
It is, however, possible to 'Save As' from AppleWorks spreadsheets in a
variety of Excel formats, the most suitable probably being 'Excel Win
97, 2000, XP 2002 spr' (Maclink Plus - usually bundled - required).
Tables, Mesa and LibreOffice will all import this
together with the calculation fields intact (apart from one or two more
esoteric functions which are not supported) though some formatting
won't make the transfer. Of these, Tables and Mesa are attractive and
easy to use but fairly limited. LibreOffice is quite powerful though
stability may be an issue. Excel would be an obvious choice (if
anything it's too powerful) but is
only available as part of the Microsoft Office suite and is very
expensive (and may only be installed on one computer per purchase at
the lowest price option).
Presentation
The presentation module in AppleWorks was very limited, and probably
not
many people were using it. The '
Keynote'
module of the older version of iWork can open
AppleWorks presentation files directly (and with the advantage of
running them without resetting the monitor resolution the way
AppleWorks does, upsetting your Desktop layout in the process).The new
version, v8, requiring High Sierra, does not open AppleWorks files and has
lost various functions.
Paint
AppleWorks' Paint module is stuck firmly in the distant past, designed
to work at 72 dpi (the original printer standard) though it will handle
higher resolutions. Though nothing else can open these documents it's
easy to save them as PICTs, whereupon they can be opened in any other
pixel-based program such as
GraphicConverter or
Photoshop. The latter
in particular, even in the cheaper
Elements
version, allows multiple
layers so that individual items can be selected and edited - something
not available in AppleWorks, where the whole document is one layer and
individual objects can't be separately selected.
There is also a free open-source program called
GIMP
(Gnu Image Manipulation Program): older versions required you to
install the X11
Windowing Layer (from the 'Optional Installs' installed on your
installer disk if it's not been installed by default) but this is no
longer necessary; some of its
behaviour is not very Mac-like.
The
next page deals with
the Database module.