AUGD: Re: Appleworks
AUGD: Re: Appleworks
- Subject: AUGD: Re: Appleworks
- From: Nicholas Pyers <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 23 Mar 2006 17:56:58 +1100
On 23/03/2006, at 2:53 AM, Don Swayze wrote:
I find this puzzling. Appleworks has spread sheets, graphs, data
bases. iWork only does page layout and Keynote. Is apple going to
bring the other items into iWork. What will apple bundle with the
imac and mac mini as a can do suite for average users.
There were lots of rumors leading up to Macworld 2006 that iWork '06
would include a module called Numbers or Cells that was supposed to
be a basic spreadsheet. What we got instead were calculated tables
in both Pages and Keynote. According to some, this was considered
enough for the average Home, Student or small office. If you need
high powered spreadsheets in the business world, then there is a
"great package already available for both Mac and PC's" - and guess
what! The company that produces that suite of software appeared on
stage at Macworld announcing that they'll be producing it for at
least another five years.
While that is good news for the business community, it is very
expensive for the average home user (students and teachers can get
discounted versions, but I don't think they get as good as AppleWorks
retail pack, let alone bundled free on new macs)
iWork does include graphs in both Pages and Keynote (and has done so
since v1 of each package)
And we all tend to forget that Apple owns and develops one of the
bess database app out there - FileMaker Pro. A Filemaker Lite
included with iWork would be great - even if was back to say FMP v3
or 4 feature sets and only supported the creation and editing of flat
databases (but perhaps the ability to read and edit data in
relational FMP databases)
The other thing missing a separate drawing/painting program (and one
day I'll understand the difference between the two modules).
As mentioned in another post I now use Keynote to do some basic
"drawing" work, but a separate module would be great. My suggestion
to Apple is look at buying GraphicConverter and giving it an Apple
interface or look at something like TuxPaint.
As an aside, I also would have stuck iWeb into iWork, rather than
iLife myself, but it does make sense the way Apple have done it as it
integrates with all the iLife apps more than it does with Pages or
Keynote.
And yes, a "full featured" office suite is needed to ship with ALL
new Macs - both consumer and pro models should include it.
I do like the current policy of including the trial versions of
Microsoft Office and iWork '06 on all macs and particularly like the
fact that iWork continues to be able to open files after the trial
period runs out, but you can't edit or save (can you still print?)
them. So if someone sends you a file in those formats, you can still
look at them. (does the expired trial version of Office allow this?)
The next step for Apple should also be to develop an iWork Reader for
Windows users (I know you can save a PDF and that is probably a
better idea, but there times when you want/need to send the original
file and check it on a PC)
--
Nicholas Pyers, Macintosh User Group Resources
email: email@hidden
web: http://www.nicholaspyers.com/usergroups
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