Wouldn't this be Great? iOffice

J

joeth

The Mac Duck
Now that we have enough fast web browsers around, we needn't use M$ Internet Explorer. The Only thing we are forced to use on the mac made by M$ is Office. Apple's alternative, Appleworks, doesn't offer a fraction of the features in M$'s office suite. Apple should add another iApp to it's string of products with the 'i' at the beginning, iOffice. This could include Spreadsheets, Presentations, Word Processing, Email, Instant Messaging (iChat), Web Browsing all with compatibility with OS X and Office.

I'm sure this would prove a hit.

'Apple iOffice - the first real challenge for Office'

I can picture this now. Theres always speculation on threats given to apple from Microsoft:

'Do this or there'll be no more updates for Office'

I personally believe these kind of threats could be happening, and if Apple produced a good Office Suite Microsoft would be stuck......

What do you think?
 
Alas: the Word file format is MS's condition for monopole over text industry. So you'll need MS Word until MS sells it.
 
Well Apple's 'iApps' tend to be free for consumers, I doubt they would put that much effort into a comparable MS Office alternative and just hand it out like iTunes.

Also, you have to think about those who are PC users and are thinking about getting a Mac, the #1 most asked question at my school's computer store is "Do Macs run Microsoft Office and is it the same as the Windows one?" It's hard enough now to get people to understand that MS Office for Mac works fine with MS Office for Windows. If we lose that, try explaining that iOffice is the same. It just makes the whole 'Switch' thing even harder to swallow.

I dunno, that's just my opinion. I think Apple is probably working on the next AppleWorks, which undoubtly will be a whole lot better (and more compatable with MS) than the current carbonized 6.

And Toast, AppleWorks currently reads and saves documents in MS Word and Excel formats.
 
AppleWorks currently reads and saves documents in MS Word and Excel formats.
Click to expand...

The Word filter is extremely superficial in AppleWorks: old versions of Word won't work, stylesheets and § features can be garbled, it seems to depend on the Word file itself.

EDIT: Word file format integration is sh¡tty even in Quark XPress.
 
Why not apply evolution instead of revolution? Let Microsoft develop Microsoft Office Macintosh Edition 11 (or whatever it'll be called). And develop AppleWorks 7, which already has included better support for MS' formats. Then, instantly, make an effort bigger than that. AppleWorks 8 (renamed iOffice, for example) can be a competitor on the market. Microsoft might say 'we won't support MS Office Mac Edition any longer if you get even better' all they want: iOffice 2 will then surpass MS Office. Integration with Adobe InDesign will be exceptional. This all doesn't have to happen over night.
 
Alas, intelligent evolution will be REVOLUTION, because when you know a bit of file structure (and I know you know some, fryke ;)) you are aware of the sh¡tty mess the Word file is.

Word file format MUST be eliminated. RTF is good; Apple uses it as basis with TextEdit, and Unix/Linux just use this everywhere too. I think there should be something done in this way.

But file format is only first step, second one is text editor. Though I find TextEdit fine, I understand some people want the Word toolbar to feel soo powerful and smart :). So I think a kind of "Adobe" text editor will have to hatch for Word to be abandoned.

That's two revolutionary steps, hey ? ;)

PS: InDesign integration: TextEdit is fine, as for Quark integration I've always worked with BBEdit :)
 
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