Can I run AppleWorks 6.2.9 on Mac OS X Snow Leopard?

As Rosetta may be installed, there is no reason to kill AppleWorks.

Yvan KOENIG (VALLAURIS, France.) samedi 15 août 2009 11:21:09

The assumption is, yes, as long as you install Rosetta, but no one will know for sure until we get Snow Leopard & try.

My jaw is dropping reading through this forum. I've been told repeatedly that when I switch to OSX 10.5.X or 10.6, that I will no longer be able to use AppleWorks. This forum is a revelation (and a massive relief).

Several articles I've just read explain that Rosetta is Apple software contained in OSX that allows earlier version applications to operate in the Intel-based Macs. Thanks be for that.

Question: How does one identify if they have Rosetta in their system? Does it appear in the Applications list? Can it be installed if it's not provided with the factory OS?

Best regards, and thanks.

Rosetta isn't a separate application: it's built into OSX and is effectively invisible. When you run a PPC program it automatically provides a method for this to run on Intel; you don't have to do anything about it. The only setting you ever come across is that in the 'get info' for 'Universal' programs (which contain the code for both PPC and Intel) can be forced to run in Rosetta even though they can run on Intel directly: this is normally only necessary for Universal plugins which are being used with a PPC program (as you can't run an Intel plugin within a PPC program).

Appleworks is a PPC program and thus requires Rosetta to run, but in practical use one is quite unaware of this.

The absence or (possibly optional) presence of Rosetta has not yet been announced; there have been reports about this elsewhere but since they may violate Non-Disclosure Agreements one is not supposed to quote them on this forum.

As I received my Snow Leopard yesterday from Apple directly, I can say that AppleWorks 6.2.9 works fine in Rosetta. Rosetta is a custom install option when you install Snow Leopard. So be sure not to miss it when you do the installation. Note, You can't use Snow Leopard on PowerPC Macs. You will need an Intel Mac, as I explain in my FAQ*:

http://www.macmaps.com/upgradefaq.html

- * Links to my pages may give me compensation.

I am running AppleWorks 6.2.9 on Mac OS X Snow Leopard. I can tell you that it does work, but there is at least some functionality that is now broken that was working perfectly in Mac OS X 10.5. In particular, if I create a "Drawing" or "Painting" document, I can't use "Scale By Percent" which is accessed via "Arrange" in the menu bar. For a "Drawing", document, I can work around this by selecting the object that I want to resize and dragging one of its handles. For a "Painting", document, though, it's not so obvious.

This was the very first thing that I ran into when I tried to use AppleWorks 6.2.9 on Mac OS X Snow Leopard, so it will be interesting to see what else happens.

Yes, I know that I shouldn't be using really old software like AppleWorks 6.2.9.

Yes, I know that I shouldn't be using really new software like Snow Leopard.

In AppleWorks preferences, if you choose to show "Font Menu In Actual Fonts", the display will be painfully slow in Mac OS X Snow Leopard. Again, it worked very nicely in Mac OS X 10.5. It's also working great on my 1.5 GHz G4 running Mac OS X 10.4. This feature is essentially unusable with Snow Leopard.

I have no time to check but my guess is that under Snow, at first run, AW is forced to rebuild the cache used to display the menu in actual fonts.
If I am right, at next use it would be faster.

Yvan KOENIG (VALLAURIS, France) mercredi 2 septembre 2009 10:53:08

The font list does scroll slower and jerkier but it looks good though!

My Appleworks won't open with Snow Leopard!

Whenever you do an update, it's a good idea to do two maintenance tasks, one for the system (Repair Permissions) and one for AppleWorks (delete preferences). (Thanks to Barry for this way to format this very common answer.)

To Repair permissions, launch Disk Utility, found in the Utilities folder in your Applications folder, click on First Aid, then on Repair Permissions.

To delete AppleWorks’ preference files, go to HD > Users > (your account) > Library > Preferences. Find and delete the file com.apple.appleworks.plist. Find and open the folder AppleWorks in this Preferences folder, then delete all of the enclosed files (with the exception of the Button Bar Preferences if you have customized the Button Bars). AppleWorks will recreate the preference files as it needs them.

halliesmama - Have you installed Rosetta with SnowLeopard? That is need for AW to work.

I am running Appleworks in Snow Leopard. It works fine, except...

If I have more than one database open at a time and go to print, it will not allow me to select "current record" or "visible records" in the dialogue box and if I hit the print button anyway, the printer spits out a blank sheet.

I can get it to work again by restarting Appleworks and only opening one DB file. But it does not continue to work once I have opened a second one, even if I close it again.

I have already done permissions repair and have deleted the preferences files.

Ideas?

I think as systems are updated we are going to see more & more problems like these with AppleWorks. That your AppleWorks files can be opened is good & it's time to look into other options for more "modern" software. Take a look at Roger Wilmut's web pages for a lot of very useful information on moving on from AppleWorks.

From a post by dwb:

The easy part is getting the data from an AW database into Numbers. In AW, switch to List View, select all, and then copy. Open an AW spreadsheet, place your cursor in cell A2 and paste. Your data is now in a spreadsheet and you can use row 1 to enter your field names. I saved this file as a Mac Excel file and it opened in Numbers just fine - I'm guessing saving as an AW6 spreadsheet would also work.

Now that the data is in Numbers comes the hard part. The data is there and you can use Find to find a specific person or thing but you don't have the nice looking reports that AW's database gave you. Also, if you had been performing calculations, these are gone and will have to be re-established. The calculation part is pretty simple usually, after all, Numbers is a spreadsheet. The reports are a bit more challenging. Look at the VLookup and HLookup formulas - they should be helpful. Look through the Numbers templates for ideas too.

I have found that copying & pasting from list view in an AppleWorks database to a Numbers table will retain any formatting that you might lose by saving first as an AppleWorks spreadsheet.



Message was edited by: Peggy