AppleWorks 6.2.7

Rating:
Summary: There are better choices available
Review: AppleWorks isn't really a bad product - it's been around for quite a few years, previously as ClarisWorks - but it desperately needs an update. For example, version 6.2.7 still doesn't take full advantage of features found in Mac OSX. Furthermore, it has some rather strange interface quirks and lacks some important features (spellcheck as you type, for example). My recommendation: spend an extra $50 and buy Microsoft Office v.X for student and teacher, which is a much better software package. Another option is to buy a printing package such as The Print Shop for Mac OSX, by Broderbund/MacKiev, which offers excellent design and print capabilities for all sorts of projects (labels, greeting cards, calendars, etc). Hopefully Apple will update AppleWorks someday soon.

Rating:
Summary: I hate Microsoft, but it's a Microsoft world
Review: First of all, let me say I love Apple and dislike Microsoft. I would always choose to support Apple over Microsoft. If you are one of those people that never has to share documents with a Windows friend, then AppleWorks will be fine. I don't think it's as good as Office (or Word or Excel, if you aren't buying the whole Office suite,) but for the price, I'd buy AW instead.

Anyway, my frustration level with AW has reached the breaking point, and now I'm going to have to go out and do what I never wanted to do- buy Microsoft Office. AW is supposedly compatible with Excel and Word documents, but AW has often converted incoming Excel and Word documents to junk, if it is even able to open the Microsoft documents at all. Also, if you want to save an AW spreadsheet as an excel document, don't expect it to transfer your work nicely. Simple data cells it can handle, but charts- no way. As a business school student, it's essential that I am able to send and receive Word and Excel documents without issues. AppleWorks does not do the job.

It breaks my heart to recommend a Microsoft product over an Apple product, but until Apple makes a truly compatible alternative to Office, I have no choice but to recommend that my fellow Mac users buy Office instead of AppleWorks.

Rating:
Summary: Nice system but...
Review: I like apple works, and it gets me by for my needs at home but for business I need Windows XP. I like the simple interface, and the straight forward approach. I don't like the spell check, and I have had some troubles saving files in a format where they could be opened easily on a pc. Outside of that I'm a huge Apple Fan and I hope they make the necessary changes to get this thing going right. :)

Rating:
Summary: It's Terrible in OSX.
Review: I loved Appleworks for OS9. It provided a straightforward, easy-to-use word processor, spreadsheet, database, and illustration tools at very reasonable cost. Appleworks had everything anyone would need for home use -except the ability to read or write MS Word documents. I used Appleworks for personal projects, though, because it was a pleasure to use. Appleworks 6.2.9 for OSX is an entirely different animal. It's buggy beyond belief. Apple shouldn't have released software that has not been successfully upgraded for their current operating system. (I don't know why Amazon is still selling 6.2.7, as I bought 6.2.9 months ago. But the two versions have no obvious differences.)

The good news is that Appleworks can now read MS Word documents...sort of. When you open a Word document, it launches TextEdit. You can read the document in TextEdit and modify it if you like. But tabs don't translate well. If there are columns created with tabs, the document will be indecipherable. Other nice features (that are not new) include a convenient thesaurus. It's not comprehensive, but it is good enough to be useful in finding definitions and alternatives to words. It's easy to turn off "Smart Quotes" in Preferences, and one click of the mouse will make it the default. No need to create a template. The spellchecker works when you tell it to, not while you're typing.

Creating a good-looking document and, in fact, knowing how it will look when printed is a frustrating undertaking. What was so simple and easy in OS9 has become a challenge in OSX. The first thing you will notice when you begin to create a document is the size of the document window. Appleworks' windows no longer open to a usable size. They are small. So first you must resize the window using the zoom percentage tool in the lower left-hand corner. 125% should be about right for most purposes. Then, for word processing, you will need to select "fractional character widths" in Preferences, if you'd like to be able to read what you've typed. Otherwise most fonts will display with gaps between some letters while others are on top of one another, making it impossible to see the periods at the end of sentences or to tell which spaces between words and letters are real. Oddly, even without fractional character widths enabled, the document will print without odd spaces. Fonts also print much heavier than they appear. Type looks wispy onscreen and barely legible in some fonts, but they print fine. That's not much help if you can't see how it will look as you are creating the document.

Some lines are missing the last couple of tabs on the line, making it impossible to use tabs to line up text on the far right side of the document. The cursor jumps down to the next line before it should. I have disabled the .cwk suffix in Preferences, but it still appears on some documents, and I cannot get rid of it manually. The font menu sticks and is difficult to scroll down. The spellcheck window appears inconveniently at the very bottom of the screen. It can be moved, but it is far too small and cannot be resized. Appleworks won't save documents with backslashes in the file name, although you can inexplicably add the backslashes later.

None of these problems were present in Appleworks 6.0 or 6.2 that I had for OS9. I experimented with Appleworks 6.2.7 and 6.2.9 in an Apple store to make sure I didn't just have a defective copy and found the same deficiencies. So I'm sorry to say that I can't recommend Appleworks for OSX, although I enjoyed using it in OS9. I couldn't say how 6.2.7 or 6.2.9 perform in OS9, but I wouldn't risk the upgrade if I still had OS9. I would copy Appleworks 6.2 and install the upgrade on one copy only, to see how it goes.