[G4] Appleworks/MS Excel

[Doug McNutt]

At 09:15 -0400 4/6/04, Anne Keller-Smith wrote:
>I've been using an old, old copy of MS Excel 98. I'd like to convert to Appleworks.

Excel 98 is not that old. It will surely do anything AppleWorks will do and there isn't much new in Excel 2001 for Mac. The changes allow a bunch of web-based things and they change the function of the command key, but there is little or no new arithmetic.

>Is there any way to keep my formulas?

Try using preferences to display formulas in Excel before copying the contents of a worksheet. The copy to the clipboard will contain the text for formulas starting with an = sign. They will paste into an AppleWorks sheet that way, but  AppleWorks may well not recognize anything but the simplest formulas. It just doesn't have all of Excel's function library available.

> Would a newer version of Appleworks keep formulas?

It's not AppleWorks that's dropping the formulas. It's Excel when you export the file. There was a format SYLK which is still partially supported by Excel but I'm not sure about AppleWorks.

>Other tack: buy a newer copy of Excel.

I'd have a look at Open Office or Gnumeric in the free software world before I did that. In principle they can be run on OS neXt but Linux runs fine on a $10.00  Intel discard. They also claim to import binary Excel files.


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