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Apple's Rumored Office Suite
Several anonymous readers noted that the mac rumor mill is churning already with news for the upcoming MacWorld. The current rumor is a new office suite to replace the incredibly dated AppleWorks and incredibly bloated and slow MS Office.
...But Office v.X for the Mac is actually quite nice. I've yet to experience document incompatability problems with MS Office for Windows. For simple documents like research papers and personal writing it does the job reasonably well. Now I haven't written a large thesis with piles of footnotes, or a large book with a huge integrated outline... so it could blow for serious work and I wouldn't know. But the fact is that I need to submit my work in MS word format and it does the job.
Apple may come out with a quality office suite. But if MS Word/Windows users run into even minor incompatability problems with its output, it will fail. I assume the real reason Apple is doing this is because MS may stop supporting MS Office for the Mac. Which would be a real shame. I'm not saying the government should force them to continue supporting the product, but I strongly doubt it's an unprofitable product line. I would certainly buy the next release. Shouldn't shareholders have some say in this? --M
If by "from the get-go" you mean when it was still called ClarisWorks, I have to take offense (given that I wrote a lot of it). All the reviewers of the early versions, and millions of users, would disagree with you. In fact there are still lots of things you can do with AppleWorks that you can do with no other single program out there.
That said, by the time the name was changed to AppleWorks, the ball had clearly been dropped, and essentially nothing has been done for the past few years. So, dated - yes. Sucked from the get-go - I think (hope) you have a minority opinion there.
Details on ClarisWorks/AppleWorks history here:
http://www-swiss.ai.mit.edu/~bob/clarisworks.php/
Bob Hearn
They reported that on Dec 29th.
Think Secret Predicts Sub-$500 Headless Mac
Posted by timothy on Wednesday December 29, @07:03AM
The MacOS version requires XFree86 to run and work has slowed on the Aqua and Quartz tracks.
I'm quite certain that should this rumored office suite actually come to market that it will not require XF86 to run. This should please the average Mac user that finds the current OOo interface terrible looking, not to mention very interesting to use.
Don't get me wrong, I use OOo and am happy for it. I hope to help the porting along as much as I can. Right now, it's still scary for most (Mac) people.
Slashdot's Apple section: Rumors for Nerds. Speculation that matters.
Probably already posted, but there's NeoOffice/J, which does a much better job of integrating into Mac OS X. Ignore the Windows-style widgets in the user interface - properly important things like styled copy-and-paste, printing, system fonts and so on work brilliantly, unlike with the X11-based port.
:-)
Also, it's very much in active development, and keeps on improving. They've been working on the low-level stuff first, getting that to work nicely, and they're now starting on making it much more Mac-like. Aqua menus are just one recent addition...
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
Powerpoint compatibility is diabolical, because it's native tables and graphics are rubbish, so it constantly embeds foreign application documents on the Windows side that cannot be displayed on the Mac. In the other direction, God forbid you actually paste a screenshot in, because it will be a compressed TIFF, and when that gets back to Powerpoint for Windows it will not only fail to display it, but will actively hard-replace it with a graphic of a broken red X.
Office v.X on the Mac cannot do html round-tripping. So for anyone who prefers to store files as html like I do (for easier style sheet editing - die wysiwig die - and for post processing and export), you are screwed. The html format is not interoperable between the two either, information is lost here as well.
& is shorthand for 'et'. It is actually 'et', written all as one character, if you look closely at it.
Rik
it's not quite a Powerpoint killer.
For you, maybe.
What killed powerpoint in our company was the total lack of an export feature for anything not resembling a PC.
After trying 3 different companies' variations of "ppt2dvd", and discovering that all three basically served as a low-framerate screengrab of the running presentation (one wouldn't even work in a dual head setup with ppt running the presentation on the second head), we gave up and used keynote's ability to convert the thing into a video file which we then turned into a dvd.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
The fundamental difference between MS and Apple is that MS already has a monopoly in desktop operating systems, and US antitrust laws prohibit leveraging one's monopoly status in one market to monopolize another. Which is exactly what MS did with IE and with Office.
Apple, on the other hand, is not a monopoly, and does not fall under such rules.