I have used MS office for quite a while on a mac, but
I ordered a new mac mini (all i could afford).
Appleworks comes on it and I'm wondering if it's
worth installing office when i pick up the cmoputer
from my apt complex office tomorrow at 9am.
I gues I'm asking the following questions.
-what are major differences?
-does appleworks export to office extensions?
-
The major difference is in target audience. Appleworks is an integrated application offering simple to learn, but capable modules for word processing, spreadsheet, database, drawing (vector graphics), and painting (bitmap graphics), and a rudimentary presentation module.
MS Office is an 'enterprise level' suite of separate applications for word processing (Word), spreadsheet (Excel) and presentation (PowerPoint). Each of these applications has a more powerful feature set, and a steeper learning curve, than the corresponding module in AppleWorks.
AppleWorks will export to Word or Excel, but only to the extent that it supports features of these two applications. The same is true for imports. PowerPoint files cannot be translated in either direction.
MS Office for Mac has no database capabilities (other than those in Excel) to speak of. Appleworks offers a flat file database module. Office has fewer drawing and painting talents than AppleWorks, but includes tools for manipulating text (Word Art) that are not included in AppleWorks.
Apple has made it pretty clear that Appleworks is at the end of its development cycle. It has not had even a maintenance update since January 2004, and few expect here will ever be another. Pollyanna would note that that means you'll never have to pay money to replace your current copy of AppleWorks with a newer version. What you have on your Mini is it, warts and all. MS Office will likely see further developmenst, but these will not be free.
If you're used to MS Office, and if you depend on sharing Office files with other users, my advice would be to stick with what you know.
If you are not tied to Office to the extent above, it will cost you no money, and little in terms of effort to try AppleWorks.
Other possibilities:
iWork: Currently this "successor to AppleWorks", still in the process of being built, contains only a word processing/page layout application (Pages) with limited spreadsheet functions, and a capable presentation application (Keynote 2). Both offer greater compatability with Word and PowerPoint files than AppleWorks, but the package doesn't yet contain either a database or (full-feature) spreadsheet application. I'm not familiar with either Keynote or Pages, but have heard that the Pages model is sufficiently different from either Word or AppleWorks to cause some initial tearing of hair by long time users of either.
OpenOffice.org, NeoOffice: Both of these are open source software with capabilities similar to those of MS Office. Open Office.org requires installation of X11, Apple's implementation of the XWindow environment; NeoOffice is a port of the previous version of OpenOffice.org, uses Java to run under OS X, and is somewhat slower because of this. OOo includes a database moduile, NO does not.
Recommendations would depend on the details of your situation.
Regards,
Barry
