Whats wrong with AppleWorks?

MacSA said:

Does anyone use AppleWorks? Particularly the wordprocessor. Is it any good, particularly for basic word processing? I've never seen any threads about it, everyone seems to end up buying MS Word. 🙂

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its fine, ive used it since i first switched 18 months ago. its used for basic wp, although i have word. AW just seems less cluttered.

I concur with rogerw. The app is perfectly ok if you want your basic word processor. But it really all depends on how much you like the additional functionality that Word offers.

You could try Open Office, and many people do, and that arguably offers more functionality than AW. However it does run through X11 and is many megs worth of a download.

If you don't need rockn'roll then I'd stick with AW.

AppleWorks doesn't have any XML support, so it's useless for cross-platform file sharing of complex documents. The bundled Microsoft file support isn't good, partly because AppleWorks doesn't support many of the features found in OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office; some formatting is lost when trying to convert from AppleWorks to Microsoft files. One feature that AppleWorks lacks is automatic word fill. If you frequently have to type long words, Writer can fill in the most likely word based on the first few typed characters. This is a useful feature when taking notes that cannot include abbreviated words, and reduces the time required to type long documents.

I use Word for advanced documents (table of contents, footnotes, etc.) but TextEdit is really fine for most things people would need--all the major formatting, fast and simple interface, etc. Just be sure to turn on "Wrap to Page" to get a page-layout view of your document.

Nisus Writer Express 2 (not quite ready but will be there soon) takes on Word's feature set and does a pretty good job of it. Check it out at Nisus.com