# Apple Office??



## kcwookie (Jul 20, 2003)

Now that M$ has announced the next version of Office, with it's insane upgrade price, when will we see a real upgrade to AppleWorks?  It can't happen soon enough.


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## Go3iverson (Jul 20, 2003)

I must have missed the new Office on this one to begin with....?


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## spitty27 (Jul 21, 2003)

post a link wookie


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## adambyte (Jul 21, 2003)

"Just when you thought it was safe to go back to TextEdit... Office v. XI for Mac!" *DUN DUN DUUUUUUUNNNNNN....*

lol. seriously, Isn't the latest office "v. X"?


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## Go3iverson (Jul 21, 2003)

Anyone have a link or info on this?  I'd really like to know considering I'm working on the 10.3 environment for my company!


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## kcwookie (Jul 21, 2003)

http://www.microsoft-watch.com/article2/0,4248,1192679,00.asp


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## Go3iverson (Jul 21, 2003)

Thanks!

Got any info on the Beta of Entourage that has full Outlook capabilities and Exchange support?


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## kcwookie (Jul 21, 2003)

No, but I have my ear to the ground.  I would like to see Mail improved.  It needs to get some of the features of Entourage.


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## Go3iverson (Jul 21, 2003)

I'd love to see apple link Mail, Address Book, and iCal together even further and that could be even better than Outlook.


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## kcwookie (Jul 21, 2003)

Is that in Panther?


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## Decado (Jul 21, 2003)

No. not in panther. but adressbook and mail is a lot nicer. I bet apple will release a new version of iCal that will be panther only... it really needs an update.


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## fryke (Jul 21, 2003)

It seems pretty obvious that Apple plans to 'replace' Entourage/Outlook with their Mail.app/iCal/Address Book package. Yes, it still needs work in order to replace that, but it's on a good way, and integration is already there. I'm sure iCal 2 will rock, and Mail.app and Address Book have already come a good way.

Now on to Office.

*Keynote ~ PowerPoint*
If Apple wants Keynote to be a real competitor, the file format exchange has still to be improved. Also: Keynote needs a bit less bells and whistles and better integration with other applications (why not Word & Excel, but more importantly: with RTF-Import/-Links etc.).

*TextEdit (Pro) ~ Word*
TextEdit (the one included with Panther) is already a nice little word processing application. It's lacking some 'pro' features - but basically a Pro version of TextEdit for 99$ could replace MS Word for many, many users. Another thing: Nisus Writer Express is quite nice. If it earns Word compatibility through Mac OS X' text handling framework (TextEdit), it's basically there, and there's no actual need for an Apple Document application (as has been rumoured). However, Apple might want to make their own - and maybe has some pretty good ideas.

*? ~_Excel*
For real Office users, a good Excel replacement must be available, if Apple wants to be able to compete. If they only take what AppleWorks' spreadsheet part can do, that actually won't do, I think. It's good, but not good enough. Well: Apple still has some time. Office 11 for Mac will come, and until then, there's Office v. X.


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## kcwookie (Jul 21, 2003)

Keynote ~ PowerPoint 
 If Apple wants Keynote to be a real competitor, the file format exchange has still to be improved. Also: Keynote needs a bit less bells and whistles and better integration with other applications (why not Word & Excel, but more importantly: with RTF-Import/-Links etc.). 

 One of the biggest problems is screen size.  Keynote uses 800x600 and PowerPoint uses 720x480.


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## Go3iverson (Jul 21, 2003)

I think they're very close and I really expected in in Panther, but my Dev Release doesn't have it.  This may just be features they hold back to get people to buy the GM version....like File Vault.


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## fryke (Jul 21, 2003)

I don't think that these will be Panther features, really. There's too much money to be made...


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## Go3iverson (Jul 21, 2003)

Maybe there will be a consumer line that comes for free and a pro line for a charge, where you can upgrade your iCal/Mail/Address Book like you do with Quicktime to enable editing and full screen.


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## kcwookie (Jul 21, 2003)

I would be willing to do that.  I also have OpenOffice and it works but there are still problems to be fixed.


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## Go3iverson (Jul 21, 2003)

The more I think about it, offering the Mail/iCal/AB combo for free with the option to upgrade for, lets say, $29.99 to some good gimicky name Pro would be an awesome idea!  They give a great free product and the option to buy more features for a power user/corporate user.


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## kcwookie (Jul 21, 2003)

Good, we've fixed the problem.  Now Steve just has to follow through.


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## Quicksilver (Jul 22, 2003)

So if ms DID pull the plug on office when or if apple releases a good office replacement, whats the worse that could happen?

Ok, some issues mabey - but if Apple nutted it down so darn well to the point where there couldnt be any problems eg: compatability and so on. would'nt people be more enclined to switch? especially where there would be a cheaper software option? also the apple stores could demo it to new users.

what would ms do then?

just out of conversational interests....


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## Randman (Jul 22, 2003)

M$ isn't going to pull the plug. It earns revenue from Office and it's not going to let it go without a fight, especially with Apple aboit to make inroads on the Win platform with iTunes. Explorer was different because there was no money to be made and Safari has passed it, and M$ would lose more money fighting a losing battle.
   And it's not comprable to the Adobe pulling Premiere because it's M$ in the driver's seat this time.
  Apple has a long way to go before one can write the obit for Office. Hopefully the two will continue to improve the product without raising prices sky high.
  And I never thought I'd be talking about evil M$ ::evil:: having a good product (though I do use Office) that Apple needs to work on.


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## lonny (Jul 22, 2003)

Apple should work on OpenOffice and release a carbon version with the magic AppleTouch.

Just like it did with Safari...


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## Browni (Jul 22, 2003)

What mac users need is a X verson of MS accsess, i thought File maker Pro mite do the job but it cant read Acesss databasess. Why wasnt it ported?


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## kcwookie (Jul 22, 2003)

We won't see MS port Access to us.  It seems like I heard that it would take all of the resources of the Mac Business Unit about two years to get it ported and MS didn't want to waste the time because it would put things like Word and Excel updates on hold.  

BTW that came from an old interview that Shawn King did and I don't have a link.


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## MoNkeY mAgIc (Jul 22, 2003)

Excuse me if this is a dumb question, but instead of porting Access wouldn't it be easier to have a DB system that could read and write Access files, in much the same way as Text Edit or Keynote can read Word or Powerpoint.

That wold take less development effort - in fact are there tools that can already do this?


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## kcwookie (Jul 22, 2003)

I would think so but it's a M$ thing.  You know how much M$ love open source and open standards.

Mark Fuller


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## Pengu (Jul 22, 2003)

Trust me when i say we are better off without access.


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## chemistry_geek (Jul 22, 2003)

The reason M$ Access hasn't been ported to Mac OS X is because Apple already has a killer database application; it's FileMakerPro, and it integrates with WebObjects (or webpages).  While I personally have never worked with it, I've heard that it is pretty good software.

The one thing I think that is holding Apple back from gaining serious market share is that there are very little business solutions from Apple.  What software would a major corporation use on the Mac OS X platform to keep track of records, accounting, business transactions?  Does SAP make a Mac OS X version of its software.  What about support?  The reason I'm bringing this up is because I'm starting my own little venture that hopefully will take off and make a lot of money.  One of my business friends is impressed with Apple's hardware, but what REAL business software exists for it?  I know that Apple has outstanding support for XServe in case it goes down, but where's the software?  M$ Office is a start, MYOB.com has Account Edge for Mac OS X but that is for small businesses.  Apple needs to get into BIG business software, database, accounting, etc... ENTERPRISE solutions and I'm not talking about Star Trek.  Apple has all the right technologies in place for corporate security: network booting of its computers to prevent saving data locally on a hard drive which can be ripped out of the computer, File Vault will encrypt the user's home directory, but again, no REAL business software.  This would KILL M$ if Apple can integrate all this together, and show that corporations would save money in the long term through reduced corporate power consumption since PowerPC is more efficient that Wintel PC desk heaters, no forced upgrades to software or hardware.  This is why Linux is starting to make serious ground in Europe (Munich Germany).  I'd like to know what software Apple uses to keep track of its business transactions.  You can bet it isn't using Wintel!!!


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## kcwookie (Jul 22, 2003)

There is some enterprise software out there.  For example SPSS has there line of statistic and data mining software out there for OS X.  SAS also has released a number of their products too. I think that many of the necessary features that business would need are out there.  

On the downside, many businesses use M$ stuff.  M$ is not going to port anything to us that might damage WinBlows such as Access.

If Apple want into the business market they need to start at the bottom with the little folks like us.  Apple is not going to crack the big business market but it has a wonderful chance with small business.


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## jhawk28 (Jul 23, 2003)

I don't know where you heard that FileMaker Pro was very good. I have yet to hear anything good about it. 4D I hear is the way to go.

Joshua


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## malexgreen (Jul 23, 2003)

> _Originally posted by kcwookie _
> *Now that M$ has announced the next version of Office, with it's insane upgrade price, when will we see a real upgrade to AppleWorks?  It can't happen soon enough. *



So I think it's a given that if Apple comes out with their own suite of office software, that the MS MBU would drop MS Office, or do something to make the Apple office SW incompatible.  What features in Apple office would need to exist in order for you to want to drop MS Office X and use Apple office?
How doable would it be for Apple to create those features?


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## kcwookie (Jul 23, 2003)

What I would like to see Apple do is to create an a word processor and spreadsheet with the features of Word, Excel and OpenOffice that worked together with Keynote, iPhoto, iMovie or FCE, Safari, Mail, FM and the rest of the Apple software to create the whole office experience.  Couple that with Acrobat and you can create multimedia projects the would be the envy of the market.

Apple has started down that path with iLife and they need to follow through.  If all my apps worked together like iLife I would be a real happy camper.  I think they could even open the interface so that third party publishers could get in to the act also.  I think that would strengthen the Mac platform significantly.  Let's take the hub theory and run with it.

Mark Fuller


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## powermac (Jul 24, 2003)

As far as business solutions, as mentioned early. I am hoping with Apple and IBM new partnership that  Lotus software comes our way.


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## chrisdavies (Jul 26, 2003)

From my experience, Filemaker is adequate at best. For very simple projects it works OK. But as soon as you start to do more complex things there are a number of limitations that you constantly run up against.

Sad to say that MS Access is a much better system that Filemaker.


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## Browni (Jul 26, 2003)

this it true , i wil have to tell my dad to get vurtual PC


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## myotherpc'samac (Jul 30, 2003)

> _Originally posted by kcwookie _
> *Now that M$ has announced the next version of Office, with it's insane upgrade price, when will we see a real upgrade to AppleWorks?  It can't happen soon enough. *



Just to drag this back to the original post - from teh article, it doesn't look like there's anything new being added - they're just repackage versions of the existing office suite with added bits and bobs - so teh upgrade is not v.x to v.x2.  The 'new version' is just the old version with virtual PC added in.

N'est-ce pas?


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## fryke (Jul 30, 2003)

The 'currently' 'new' MS Office v. X is just that: Office v. X. Plus Virtual PC 6.1 (which is 6.0 with a Microsoft Badge) for the Advanced version.

But the Macintosh Business Unit is said to bring Office 11 to the Mac, too (not in the same news article, though). So we're talking about that instead.

The question really is: If MS stops developing Office for the Mac, does it matter? There are at least three solutions to that 'problem'...

1.) *MS Office v. X runs* and will run. For years to come. My girlfriend is still using Office 98 on OS 9 on her indigo iBook, and it opens newer Office files just fine (unless someone's actually using one of the newer features that _don't_ run on older versions).

2.) *OpenOffice.org will keep on being improved*, and the Mac OS X version will follow on the heel of the Windows and Linux versions. Even more so if MS stops developing MS Office for the Macintosh.

3.) *Apple's solution.* I believe MS will only stop MS Office when the competition becomes too hard on the Macintosh platform. But if it stops _before_ Apple creates their own office solution, then that's the last itch Apple needs to create 'a better Office'.

Thus, quoting myself: "The question really is: If MS stops developing Office for the Mac, does it matter? There are at least three solutions to that 'problem'..."


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## chemistry_geek (Jul 30, 2003)

I downloaded and installed OpenOffice.org and have been using the spreadsheet extensively.  While I cannot seem to create charts in it (not important now), it actually is quite impressive.  Most if not all of the Excel functionality is there.  When I cut and paste absolute references in Calc, the other formulas in the spreadsheet are updated automatically.  IIRC, M$ Excel won't do that; the other formulas still reference to that previous cell that used to contain required information.  Calc is a little slower than Excel, but it works and it's FREE.

I can't comment on Writer since I haven't used it much.  I opened an M$ Word document with tables and images.  Everything was there, including a few formatting mistakes, but all the content was present.

I have M$ Office and use it, but I wanted to play around with OpenOffice to see how it was faring.  While it isn't as "smooth" or "suave" as M$, it works well enough, and when I mean well enough, a Windows user would not have any difficulty switching to OpenOffice, but a Mac user might have some reservations.

Working with X Windows isn't bad, you just have to get used to it.


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## Lycander (Jul 30, 2003)

MS Access is just a GUI to work with a database format called "MS Jet." The Jet drivers are encompassed in libraries (DLLs) so that is what needs to be ported in order for developers to make applications in OSX that read/write *.mdb databases. In fact, Windows programmers can programmatically create/read/write mdb files by using those libraries.

But then there's other features such as queries, building relations between tables, the Report objects, built in VB Scripting and so forth. Access is a combination of various MS technologies, so it's not like porting one application, the job entails porting numerous technologies and obviously MS does not see the Mac platform as important enough to put that much effort into it.


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## karavite (Aug 6, 2003)

Speaking as an old fart, Claris Works and then Apple Works did something no office suite has yet to do - true integration of the different apps and file types. In ClarisWorks I could create a document that contained text, drawing and a spreadsheet - when I clicked on on of those "objects" my toolbars and menus would instantly change to the appropriate options for whatever it was I was working on (text, drawing, spreadhsheet). This was the genius of Claris Works and I recall hearing something about Apple wanting (way back) to really take this further where we would no longer have a few giant apps that tried to do everything and failed, but a bunch of little apps that would each specialize in some task and allow us to apply them to a sort of generic document type. It would have been great! I think it was referred to as open doc, but I am not sure. Instead, we now have Office where on a Mac or PC, "seemless integration" is a pathetic joke. Paste a section of an excel file into a word doc or powerpoint file. Hope you chose the right option under "paste special"! Now have fun (based on what you pasted it as) in inserting text before or after this excel section. Gee, want to update that excel file AND have the changes reflected in the word file and powerpoint file AUTOMATICALLY? Good luck, though it can be done, 98% of the population will never figure out how and/or take the time to do it. Instead we have people in offices all over the place wasting their days updating multiple files. I use Office all the time and have for years. I can do almost anything on it, know tons of tricks and features buried deeply within it. I'll put my Office skills against anyone any day and you know what, it completely sucks. Let's not even talk about Access and its rounding errors in many functions when you are dealing with numbers that aren't currency (I also know a fix for that - but you would think these idiots would know we might want to use a db for something other than money or inventory counts).

We have all been locked in to this crap by MS and some of us think this is as good as it can get. Why can't a table in Word just be a god d@mn excel spreadsheet. I mean, excel has tons of formatting options. Why is a table in word something completely different?

Why did I give up on Apple Works? They had a version out some time ago, perhaps when the iMac came out, that was full of bugs and crashed non-stop. I couldn't deal with that and was very busy. I had to switch to MS for everything and I hated it. Since then I haven't looked back, yet I still wish someone would come up with the kinds of tools that would make life for all of us so much better. Had not MS unfairly cornered the market with their sub par Office tools, who knows where we would be today.

P.S. THough it is not an option for Macs, Word Perfect's suite is far more consistent in the UI across all apps. If you ever want to see what a hodge podge MS Office is, check out the keyboard shortcuts in Help. There are many duplicate functions (left over from the days when they copied competitors shortcuts to make the switch to MS less painful - you can save as 3-4 different ways with keyboard shortcuts) and shortcuts across the applications often don't match (they have cleaned this up a bit - go back to 95 to get a real laugh). On top of that, Help organizes them by function or command keys - NOT the actual thing you want to do. So, if I am looking for a shortcut for table options in Word, instead I have to sort through Shift, Shift+Function, Function key... that have all kinds of different functions with no relation whatsoever. It is an absolute mess that they can never completely fix.

Boy, I feel better now. Thanks for letting me rant.


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