Apple's iWork emerges as top rival to Microsoft Office

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Actually

Apple HAD a good office suite: ClarisWorks 5 whcih they
changed the name to AppleWorks 5. For a brief time they called
it ClarisWorks Office (pre Jobs return)

When they intorduced AppleWorks 6 they turned a lot of the
interface into a childish cartoon. They also made the thing
rediculously SLOW. They never fixed the thing.

AW5 had a superb interface. It's various toolbars wereclean and
intuitive. Unlike MS Office, you didn't have to display a lot of
different toolbars.

The database function of AppleWorks (ClarisWorks) was always
first class - a slimmed down Filemaker. It has enormous
usability. For smaller databases it works great. Also, it's fairly
easy. If you've worked with Filemaker and AppleWorks you see
the similarity right off the bat.

The Draw function of Appleworks was also superb. You can use
it as a trimmed down page layout app. In this area it puts Word
to shame. Ths is the app I always used to lead people into basic
page layout, since it contained most of what you needed to get
out a small book, or pamphlet and was included on all Macs (and
could be bought for $79 for Windows. This draw function was
taken from the very old ClarisDraw, one of the earlier vector
apps.

The speadsheet did not have the prebuilt functions of Excel, but
it had them in a different file that you could paste in ans easily
save. When creating a new spreadsheet, AppleWorks allowed
you to create one with jsut a certain number of columns/rows vs
the show/hide of excell. It was easier to manipulate the
columsn and rows than it is in Excel.

Lastly the Word processor was just that. It worked well and
easily allowed the import of the other AppleWorks. When you
put a drawing frame into an AW wordprocessing doc, it would
blow Word out of the water. It had a presentation function
within the word processor dating back for many years. It was
called Slideshow and did everyting you needed for presentations
except any sound effects if they mattered to you.

Was if better than MS Office. That would depend on how you
used it. It do some things better and some things worse. But
for $79 (and free when you bought a new mac), it was a
wonderful alternative. And it did import/Export MS

I have no use for this iWork so I have not looked at it. As far as I
can tell, they took a lor of the multipage draw functions form
Applewroks and added a few new tricks.

Apple NEVER pushed marketing the full capabilities of this app.
Instead they pushed it at schools as a learning tool. Maybe they
were afraid of MS killing Office Mac. I don't know.

What I do know is that, with version 6 (when OSX was first
intorduced) they did a really lousy job with the interface and
performance. Then they seemed to have forgotten it.

Posted by: j.m.galvin   Posted on: 01/23/06 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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