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.
