Wow! Thanks for the Bean! It looks like a good solution for me. I also
have TextWrangler [BBEdit Lite], mostly for its powerful search
features. I can search my entire computer from TextWrangler, and do a
better, faster job than Find or Spotlight.
I still use AppleWorks 6.2.9 in OS X, 10.5.6. That certainly shows the
quality of Apple's programming, both OS and app, that a program that
hasn't been updated since 2003.
One of my main gripes with Microsoft Word, and Office, is that it's
excessive, and excessively expensive. I use many more features of Word
than most users have even know about, and that's still less than 60% of
its features. A stripped down version of Office is all that most users
need, but written better than MS Works. How many people create locked
documents with form fields that save data in a separate file? How often
do most users embed tables that contain calculations? I can do that in
AppleWorks [not the form fields, though], but I don't have to deal with
all of the tool bars that are enough to cover up the documents.
I haven't used the "ribbon" in W'07, but I suspect that they haven't
reduced the number of items that were in the toolbars, and haven't made
them simpler or more user friendly, only easier to find--just my guess.
I'd learn more about the Ribbon, but I don't want to install Silverlight
to view the demo. I already have Flash and don't want to install any
unnecessary redundant software.
The demise of Appleworks is to me inexplicable. It's difficult to
imagine that even if the application required a complete rewrite to
be an ongoing product that it would have been significantly more
costly or less profitable than the resources that went into Pages and
Numbers. I still use Appleworks for most of my day to day
productivity tasks on my current MacBook Pro - seven computers and
four operating systems after I first used the program.
I have discovered Bean ( www.bean-osx.com ) to be a handy word
processor leveraging the text handling tools in OS X.4. I use MS
Office entirely as reader applications to open .doc, .xls and the
occasional and execrable Powerpoint document sent to me by clients -
never to create content. With the advent of the .docx file format
which can only be opened with OpenOffice on a Mac - not by any
Microsoft program - my motivation for spending a dime with Microsoft
has diminished to nil.
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