The Apple store has Office listed for $499. Yea, right, $500 for a frigging office app. No way. That's getting really close to extortion. Put Mac users' feet to the fire, just so they can handle MS file formats. But remember: MS is not a monopoly!
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Appleworks worthy?
- Thread starter plutnicki
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I totally agree with you. I have to use Word with W2K at work, and when trying to make simple documents, Word is constantly getting in my way, especially with bullets, indenting too much and making it unnecessarily difficult to format things like I want, not how it wants.
I've had to do some field work this summer and took my TiBook with me, while my colleagues took the office Vaios. I used AppleWorks 6.2.4, made a simple spreadsheet, saved it in .xls format, and it opened fine back in the office on my Windows box.
Plus, I got as much done as the 2 of them combined. Obviously, Macs make you more productive.
The MS Office apps, and especially MS Word, suffer from a disease that I call "too smart". They try to save you time by guessing what you have in mind. When they are right, they seem very clever indeed. In Word, paste a word between two other words and an extra space appears. In Excel, type "Jan", "Feb", and extend a column down, and you get "Mar" etc.
But... when things go wrong, because the app's rules aren't what you wanted or expected, you can become quite confused. Sometimes, when you paste text or delete a paragraph, the style of the adjoining paragraph changes. Sometimes, changing a style doesn't affect the paragraphs you think it should affect. Sometimes print settings don't work as you'd expect. Getting the image properties to put an image where you want can be an exercise in frustration. Getting autonumbering to start and stop on the numbers you want can be hard. All of this can be explained and mastered once you learn to think like the program and see eye-to-eye with its habits. So if you use Word 8 hours a day or are willing to read Help pages or a manual, you can get quite efficient. Otherwise, you'll be one of millions cursing at your screen and wishing you had Bill Gates' home phone number.
That's one reason why a less-clever program like AppleWorks can sometimes be easier to use than a powerhouse, particularly for beginning or casual users.
P.S. Don't bother telling me if you personally don't have trouble with the particular troublespots I mention above. I've seen a number of people trip over exactly those issues, and they weren't idiots or people who hadn't met a word processor before. Some of them will take the time to master those features, but a lot of people would be wiser to stick with a simpler program.
But... when things go wrong, because the app's rules aren't what you wanted or expected, you can become quite confused. Sometimes, when you paste text or delete a paragraph, the style of the adjoining paragraph changes. Sometimes, changing a style doesn't affect the paragraphs you think it should affect. Sometimes print settings don't work as you'd expect. Getting the image properties to put an image where you want can be an exercise in frustration. Getting autonumbering to start and stop on the numbers you want can be hard. All of this can be explained and mastered once you learn to think like the program and see eye-to-eye with its habits. So if you use Word 8 hours a day or are willing to read Help pages or a manual, you can get quite efficient. Otherwise, you'll be one of millions cursing at your screen and wishing you had Bill Gates' home phone number.
That's one reason why a less-clever program like AppleWorks can sometimes be easier to use than a powerhouse, particularly for beginning or casual users.
P.S. Don't bother telling me if you personally don't have trouble with the particular troublespots I mention above. I've seen a number of people trip over exactly those issues, and they weren't idiots or people who hadn't met a word processor before. Some of them will take the time to master those features, but a lot of people would be wiser to stick with a simpler program.
In a capitalist society such as ours, companies can set their prices to be as high or as low as they want; if people don't buy that is their decision, and this is why our society works as it does-because people have the decision to buy or not.
that is a foolish statement and does not take into account the idea of a monopoly. Businesses have very little choice but to buy office for its compatibility and so microsoft closed all the formats and so workers buy it for their homes because they have little choice not to. THats the thing, they don't really have the choice to say no cos if you did you'd be in a "world of pain" (to use a friend of mine's phrase while saying what he thinks being a macuser is like (a pc guy).).
THis means the choice is very one sided, this means microsoft can charge whatever the hell they want and ppl will buy it. Soon this will backfire hopefully, or some anti-monopoly laws would be brought.
It is my understanding that the laws on monopoly are quite weak in the UK and many monopoly's exist but are strictly regulated.
i never said i agreed with M$'s tactics; i just am stating the fact that if you dont agree with M$ don't buy from them.
And consequently are unable to deliver documents to your client in the format they require, which is not an open format against which other capitalist companies can compete. Then the JUST'US Department (CR 2003 David Lehenky) let's them off the hook. No money flowing there, wink, wink. It's amazing what you can do in this world when you have US$50B working for you.
Just my opinion, folks. I don't mean to offend, really.
Personally, I'd rather use software that thinks like I do rather than the other way around. Not that AW is great in this respect either, but it doesn't lead to the frustrations that trying to think like Word does...
Biggest understatement of the year. I've used Office on both platforms for years, and, excepting word art, I still can't put images in the place I want them with any sort of consistency. I may have gotten lucky once or twice, but that was it.
The problem with AppleWorks is that it's missing a few key features, such as real-time spell-check (my biggest gripe), unlimited on rows in the spreadsheet, and any compatibility with anything in the database part.
What's even worse is the extortion from buying the Microsoft Office programs individually. If you only want one or two of the programs (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) and can't afford the entire Office package, Microsoft still wants $370 for each program. So, if you only need Excel and PowerPoint, you are punished by being charged $740
because you didn't want to buy the $500 package. One problem I noticed at my local Apple Store is that potential customers would look at Apple merchandize and claim that they could only afford a less expensive system because they believed that they had to buy Microsoft Office too. The store finally took the promotional containers filled with Microsoft boxes that were in every section of the store and refilled them with Apple products. OpenOffice.org is even installed on some of the computers in the store, and a demo of this software gets some people to buy more from Apple. 
What Happened to Document?
Weren't there rumors of an Apple word processor called "Document" floating around a while ago? I got the impression that, after Keynote, Apple would release other products aimed at the MS Office suite.
I use Word a lot at work but I would much rather use an Apple word processor. Sometimes Word does things that I just don't want it to do. Drives me bananas.
Squire
Weren't there rumors of an Apple word processor called "Document" floating around a while ago? I got the impression that, after Keynote, Apple would release other products aimed at the MS Office suite.
I use Word a lot at work but I would much rather use an Apple word processor. Sometimes Word does things that I just don't want it to do. Drives me bananas.
Squire