ABANDONING APPLEWORKS

            CONTENTS
1. INTRODUCTION
2. WORD PROCESSING
3. DRAWING
4. SPREADSHEET, PRESENTATION
     & PAINT
5. DATABASE
6. FILEMAKER PRO
7. RESOURCES

What is Appleworks?

AppleWorks, originally called ClarisWorks, is an office program which was bundled with new Macs from the early 1990s until the move to Intel Macs. It was also available for purchase separately, and was not particularly expensive. It has a number of modules: Word Processing, Draw, Paint, Database, Spreadsheet, and originally a Terminal application (dating back the the pre-internet days when one would log directly into remote computers over the phone line) which was later replaced by a Presentation module.

It's a remarkable piece of programming: a reasonable size, and quite fast, but also very powerful and flexible. Each module stands up well on its own (though the Paint module is now well outdated) but they can also integrate well, allowing you for example to copy fields out from a database into a Word Processing document while retaining text formatting, or copy objects from a Draw document into a Word Processing document.

Unless you need advanced Word Processing capabilities - for example if you are writing a textbook and need footnotes and indexing - the Word Processing module is likely to fill all your needs: you can also add draw objects and pictures to it in a far easier and controlled manner than many other word processors. You can have text boxes (which can be linked to carry the text from one to the next), wrap body text round draw objects, and have multiple columns, headers and footers, spell checking, and word count.

The Draw module is in effect the same as the Word Processing module without the word processing layer: it's possible to do complex magazine-style layouts or involved technical drawings with relative ease.

The Database has an easy to understand graphical format, and can have multiple layouts, field formats including date, number and calculation, and do complex searches.

The Spreadsheet module is not as powerful as Excel, but has a good range of calculation functions: spreadsheet frames can be embedded in Draw or Word Processing documents while retaining calculation abilities.

Why abandon it?

Why would anyone want to abandon such a useful program? It does have a few faults - its display of small font sizes is unsatisfactory as it can't take advantage of OSX font smoothing, and attempts to use Unicode input will crash it; but it's still capable of more than almost any other single program.

However it's a very old piece of programming, originally intended for OS7 and up, and later reworked for OSX. It can't run directly on Intel Macs, and requires Rosetta (in effect a PPC emulator built into OSX). I understand that for technical and practical reasons it's not possible to upgrade the coding: and it has been officially 'end-of-lifed' by Apple: it's no longer sold by them, nor is it supported. So far it works fine on Snow Leopard on Intel Macs (though a couple of quite minor bugs have emerged): but OSX Lion, recently released, does not support Rosetta and so it's impossible to run Appleworks on it. However it's worth emphasising that it's not going to stop working suddenly on its own: it will only happen if you upgrade your System or machine to a version which won't support it.

For people with a long-standing investment in it the prospect of its possible demise is extremely annoying. In some cases it is possible to open Appleworks documents in other programs: but in others it isn't, and it will be necessary to do any conversions before making changes which may disable Appleworks.

To summarize the position:

• Word Processing documents can be opened directly only in Pages (AppleWorks 6 only).
  
• Draw Documents can be opened directly only in EazyDraw (the more expensive version from their website, not the cheaper one from the Mac App Store, and you will need v4.0 'Retro' not the most recent version) or Intaglio (though this appears not to be able to handle very complex drawings).
  
• Spreadsheets can be opened directly only in Numbers.
• Presentations can be opened directly only in Keynote.

To use other programs, or open Painting or Database documents at all, you must export from AppleWorks first. Therefore it is important not to wait to migrate your documents until you have made an upgrade which has broken Appleworks.

However, I repeat that this can only happen if you yourself apply an upgrade: AppleWorks will continue to work fine on existing setups.

If you have upgraded to Lion/Mountain Lion and have AppleWorks documents you cannot open, then you should be able to install Snow Leopard on an external hard disk and start from that (provided that the Mac did not come with anything higher than Snow Leopard originally installed); and success has been reported in running Snow Leopard under emulation in Parallels - the method is described here: it seems complex; however Snow Leopard Server is available in the Apple Store (by telephone) at a reduced price (at the time of writing) and this makes the process a lot easier. I haven't tried either method: use at your own discretion. You can then run AppleWorks as an emergency measure.

Subsequent pages in this essay will examine possible alternatives to the various modules in more detail. The next page deals with the Word Processing module.