[G4] Appleworks -- look at NeoOffice/J rather than MS Office or OpenOffice

[David L. Presberg]

Better than OpenOffice is NeoOffice/J.  It has *all* of the
apps that "M$ Office" has, opens .doc, .xls, and .ppt files (with
what one would expect w.r.t. font-issues and the definitions
of "Default" styles from the sender's machine to your machine,
of course).  It also has a very good outside-of-PowerPoint
drawing tool.

You can get it, for free since it is in the same Open Software
family as OpenOffice, from:

    http://www.planamesa.com/neojava/en/download.php

You do *not* have to install an X11 windows system for it because
it is implemented in Java.  But it is based on OpenOffice code
so gets the benefit of all the developers/maintainers of that
project (all the way back to Sun's StarOffice) as well as a
very dedicated group of Mac OS-X Macintosh-tailored version
maintainers.

Note there is a change in the Java support by Mac OS X between
Panther and Tiger, so some Java-based software may have
some problems.  The NeoOffice/J maintainers have already
diagnosed the issues -- see the forum thread at:

    http://trinity.neooffice.org/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&t=1329

for the fixes that allow you to run NeoOffice/J as well as
any old or new Java code in Tiger.

I've been using this set of Office-replacement tools for a while
and I find them more capable than what I had used in AppleWorks.
You'll probably want to "export" important files out of AppleWorks
into their equivalent MS Office versions so that they can be read
by NeoOffice/J.  Unfortunately, it doesn't read AppleWorks file
formats since those have been fairly private to Apple (i.e., not
sufficiently, publically, documented).

-- David L. Presberg
       Software Engineer: Compilers and Language-Related Tools

RE:
 > Date: Sun, 1 May 2005 12:41:31 -0400
 > From: Anne Keller-Smith <earthpigz at earthlink.net>
 > Subject: [G4] Appleworks
 > To: "A place to discuss Apple's G4 computers."
 > 	<g4 at listserver.themacintoshguy.com>
 > Message-ID: <DF189FF7-BA5F-11D9-B438-00039368BC92 at earthlink.net>
 > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
 >
 > I read in Macworld that Appleworks is going bye bye.
 >
 > Sort of a problem for me because I need it for budget and for when
 > Windows users send me Word docs. That's sort of all.
 >
 > I also notice that Maclink seems to not work at present. ???
 >
 > What are you all doing about Appleworks? I could just keep on using it
 > forever except if new versions of Word don't open, I am sunk.
 >
 > Not interested in buying MS product right now, humph. Don't really use.
 > Would buy Quicken for the budget. (Although I like the simplicity of
 > the spreadsheet.)
 >
 > Anne Keller Smith
 > Down to Earth Web Design
 > mailto:earthpigz at earthlink.net
 > http://www.downtoearthweb.com

AND RE:
 > Date: Sun, 1 May 2005 14:09:23 -0400
 > From: Johns Maillist <mymaillist at mac.com>
 > Subject: Re: [G4] Appleworks
 > To: "A place to discuss Apple's G4 computers."
 > 	<g4 at listserver.themacintoshguy.com>
 > Message-ID: <04FDFF8C-85B1-4B2E-9253-2470326C3AFE at mac.com>
 > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; delsp=yes; format=flowed
 >
 > Add X11 to your system and use OpenOffice!