AppleWorks and Lion

Hello Roger, I have been following your advice in "Abandoning AppleWorks" regarding the transfer of a drawing to Pages.

I am stuck with a problem: after pasting the Draw document in a Word processing one, I can't ungroup it. When I do shift command G, nothing happens.

Any suggestion?

Thanks!

Patrick

Before pasting in the Word Processing document, click on the draw tool in the tools palette (the arrow): drag the mouse within the document to enter draw mode.

Thanks for your answer. However, I've been trying again and again but it doesn't work. (and by the way, where do I find the setup to move to Landscape?)

To change to Landscape: menu File>Page Setup and Change Orientation - click the icon for landscape.

As to your first issue: please walk through this process and report where it falls over.

Create three draw items in a Draw document. Hit command-A to select all.

Hit command-G to group.

Hit command-C to copy. Open a new WP document. Click the arrow icon in the tool palette, then click and drag the mouse a small distance in the page, roughly where you want the images to appear.

Hit command-V to paste the grouped images.

Make sure the group is selected, then hit shift-command-G to ungroup.

Thanks for all that.

The good news: I managed to make it work, thanks to al the details you provided.

The bad news: the Appleworks WP document seems to be in the standard 21x29,7 cm format. My Appleworks drawings (I have 5 of them alltogether!) are bigger than that.

So I only get a portion of the original document in the Appleworks WP and then in the Pages document.

Set the page size in File>Page Setup (though you presumably won't be able to set a larger size than your printer will handle) and reduce the margins to the minumum possible.

I am making good progresses... :-)

Thanks you so much for your help!

Okay, here's where I admit that I'm keeping my old iMac with Snow Leopard OS. EZDraw seems to demand that I use photos at 72 dpi in new draw docs (or maybe I just don't understand why my resized 300 dpi photos from PhotoShop don't copy & paste at that size on the EZDraw doc) , which is just NOT ok, although EZDraw will open up old Appleworks docs just fine. Maybe I should just bite the bullet & try to figure out how to make my art cards in Pages...(ack! I hate this learning curve!). Meanwhile, Numbers will NOT open up Appleworks data bases which I've used for years for address lables, and as far as I can tell, no one's come up with a work around for that. Hrumph.

janesanha wrote:

Meanwhile, Numbers will NOT open up Appleworks data bases which I've used for years for address lables

Numbers will open AW spreadsheets. It will not open databases, nor will anything else. The only way to migrate a database is to export it in AW as an ASCII file, then import it into a database program: Bento will do for very simple databases, FileMaker Pro is very advanced and can handle pretty well any function. Of course you can only import data, not layouts.

Numbers can import a AW database that's been exported as ASCII and may be suitable for some functions - possibly including mail merge: you should ask about that in the Numbers forum.

While I understand what's happening, I think it's ridiculous that Appleworks won't work on future Operating Systems.

Does Rosetta somehow corrupt anything? If not, why punish people that like to use something old?

I have thousands of Appleworks world processing documents, and while most of them convert well to Pages, some get mangled beyond recognition. It seems silly to have to recreate documents that took many hours to create when there IS a way for them to work.

I asked our tech specialist at school if I can install my copy of Appleworks on just one computer in my classroom. We're running Snow Leopard. The answer was "Absolutely not. This will create printing problems for our network."

That just seems wrong. I run Snow Leopard at home and it works fine on my home printer.

Is our specialist correct? I don't get it.

Plus, I don't get why Apple would make something that many people like and that works now suddenly a dinosaur and unusable. Then again, they do that a lot I guess and I should just get used to it.

You have to remember that as far as Apple are concerned, AppleWorks has been end-of-lifed and not supported for quite some years now. I understand that re-writing it for Intel was not practicable for technical reasons: iWork was intended as at least a partial replacement.

As to Rosetta, like Classic I suppose it had got to the point where it was felt not worth supporting it: there may also be licencing issues (Apple don't own it).

It's interesting what you say, but I have to agree with Roger on the Rosetta issue - if there was no overhead in keeping it going, I'm sure Apple would have.

I'm still converting my AW docs to RTF or Word. Today I was looking in a folder on an old HD and came across the ClarisWorks 5 Introduction "Read Me" file. It makes fascinating reading. So many people in this forum are supporters of AW but they forget - AW itself is a cut-down version of ClarisWorks 5. Let me remind you of two incredibly powerful tools in CW5 :

1. Recording repetitive tasks as macros (abolished long before Automator appeared)
2. 'Publish & Subscribe', where you could assign data anywhere in any document as a 'field' and then subscribe to it - so if you changed the field, all the subscribed references in other docs would dynamically change too.

Yet by the time AW became 'in-house', those two (and other things) were weeded out. The button bar though, became much prettier. Style, or substance? I know which I'd prefer..

There were technical reasons why macros and Publish & Subscribe couldn't be maintained - it may have been the move to Intel, I'm not sure, but whatever the reason it wasn't technically possible: it wasn't just a decision not to bother.

Roger Wilmut1 wrote:

There were technical reasons why macros and Publish & Subscribe couldn't be maintained - it may have been the move to Intel, I'm not sure, but whatever the reason it wasn't technically possible: it wasn't just a decision not to bother.

LOL no. AppleWorks came along around 5? 6? 7? years before the move to Intel!

I'm puzzled why there should be 'technical reasons', as it wasn't technical issues that saw Claris brought 'in-house'. The code was all there, all they needed to do was prettify the buttons if that was important to them. It was probably more to do with 'Carbonising' the app ready for OS X, which was certainly on the horizon back then.

christopher rigby1 wrote:

AppleWorks came along around 5? 6? 7? years before the move to Intel!

Yes, and the macros worked on the original processors - pre PowerPC - it may even have been the move to PowerPC which scuppered them. I just don't remember when this happened: but I do know that the it was a change in the System which removed programming on which macros and Publish & Subscribe depended: I just don't remember the details. Indeed I don't think they disappeared at the same time - P & S went first.