end of the line for AW???

[Eric Wieczorek]

I just wanted to share a few words (and frustrations.) Many moons ago when I was a student in university, I learned how to do basic word processing on Macs that were available to students in the computer lab. These were Mac computer that had been donated by Apple.

Over the past 20 years or so I have been involved in education and I have operated my own company. I have purchased at least 12 or 15 computers over the years. I'm currently using a G5 tower with 2 Gigs of ram.

Much of my business is set up and run using Appleworks. Business letters, faxes, etc. etc. all have company logos and letterhead and all of my customers are in AW databases. I also use the mail merge feature to print some 3,000 envelopes per month.

We have been using OS Tiger for the past year or two and yesterday I purchased a new Imac and I also upgraded my computer to Leopard. Much to my dismay AW is not working in this new OS on my computer. When I print my business letters, the artwork does not appear on the page, the database crashes way too often, and I often get the spinning beachball of death that causes me to sit at my computer and stare at the screen for many wasted minutes. I'm not a geek but I understand that it has something to do with Rosetta and I know that Apple has announced that it will no longer support AW. I guess that this is the end of the line for me as far as AW is concerned. (and yes I have repaired permissions and done other basic maintenance.)

I now have to invest a huge amount of time and energy to re-do all of my business templates in Word or some other word processing software and to set up a new data base system to keep track my customers. I consider myself to be a loyal Apple customer, and after all the money and time I have invested in Apple products, this is a huge let down for me and a gigantic disappointment. It is all so frustrating.

I guess I won't be visiting these forums any more after I convert all of my data and I wanted to thank those that have helped me in the past.

Cheers.

BTW, can anyone recommend a good database program similar to AW?

Eric Wieczorek
Victoria, Canada

[Barry]

I just wanted to share a few words (and frustrations.) Many moons ago when I was a student in university, I learned how to do basic word processing on Macs that were available to students in the computer lab. These were Mac computer that had been donated by Apple.

Over the past 20 years or so I have been involved in education and I have operated my own company. I have purchased at least 12 or 15 computers over the years. I'm currently using a G5 tower with 2 Gigs of ram.

Much of my business is set up and run using Appleworks. Business letters, faxes, etc. etc. all have company logos and letterhead and all of my customers are in AW databases. I also use the mail merge feature to print some 3,000 envelopes per month.

We have been using OS Tiger for the past year or two and yesterday I purchased a new Imac and I also upgraded my computer to Leopard. Much to my dismay AW is not working in this new OS on my computer. When I print my business letters, the artwork does not appear on the page, the database crashes way too often, and I often get the spinning beachball of death that causes me to sit at my computer and stare at the screen for many wasted minutes. I'm not a geek but I understand that it has something to do with Rosetta and I know that Apple has announced that it will no longer support AW. I guess that this is the end of the line for me as far as AW is concerned. (and yes I have repaired permissions and done other basic maintenance.)

I now have to invest a huge amount of time and energy to re-do all of my business templates in Word or some other word processing software and to set up a new data base system to keep track my customers. I consider myself to be a loyal Apple customer, and after all the money and time I have invested in Apple products, this is a huge let down for me and a gigantic disappointment. It is all so frustrating.

I guess I won't be visiting these forums any more after I convert all of my data and I wanted to thank those that have helped me in the past.

Cheers.

BTW, can anyone recommend a good database program similar to AW?

Eric Wieczorek
Victoria, Canada

Hi Eric,

AWUG tested AppleWorks on Leopard shortly after leopard was intorduced, and found it to be stable and to work well and quickly. Other users have also reported this to be the case. That would indicate that Rosetta, which to my understandnding has had no major changes between Tiger and Leopard, is not the culprit here. A brief report of AWUG's test results is available on the home page. Click "Home" in the list below tis message.

The spinning beach ball is generally a symptom of too many items in your (AppleWorks) Recent Items folder. Clear that folder and see if there's an improvement. Search the forums for "Recent items" for details.

Among the "other basic maintenance" you've done, have you included deleting the AppleWorks Preferences files? Search "plist" or "preferences" for posts on this.

The printing problem you mention could also be a corrupt preferences issue, or could be related to the printer driver you are using.

There's no need to immediately discard AppleWorks and reproduce all your documents, but it is prudent to be planning ahead to eventually replace this EOL declared application.

There is no direct replacement for the AppleWorks Database module. Numbers, or any spreadsheet can be used as a List Manager. FileMaker Pro will do most of the things AppleWorks could do (and cn do many things that AppleWorks could not), but all your layouts and reports will have to be recreated, and both the learning curve and the price are somewhat steeper that AppleWorks's. FileMaker has just introduced a low cost (currently free to download and use the Beta, predicted price of $50/single user, $129/Family when it gets to official release status) database application named Bento. I've not seen or used it yet (It requires Leopard), but initial reports indicate it does not have the flexibility in creating reports and layouts that Appleworks does.

Regards,
Barry

[Cynthia]

BTW, can anyone recommend a good database program similar to AW?

Eric Wieczorek
Victoria, Canada

Am not too familiar with database etc. but we have switched to iWork which includes Numbers (tables), Keynote (like powerpoint), and Pages (word processing), and is inexpensive. I am in the midst of the learning curve, but I can tell you that the Tables function is vastly superior to AW. You have to learn to turn off things like automatic numbering - the program is too smart, in a way, since it automatically goes into numbering mode the instant a paragraph starts with a "number followed by a period." I've used AW as long as you have, and .... oh, I was about to say I will miss this group, but obviously I have not read carefully enough ... and now I see that this IS the iWork User Group. YAY!!! Made my day.

Cynthia
Halifax, Canada

[Tommy Apple]

Much of my business is set up and run using Appleworks. Business letters, faxes, etc. etc. all have company logos and letterhead and all of my customers are in AW databases. I also use the mail merge feature to print some 3,000 envelopes per month.



I, too, have much of my business documents created with AppleWorks. I fret the day I will have to convert all of my documents over to another program! If there is ever a solution that will enable us to continue using AppleWorks (other than keeping our old computers), please let me know!

Tom Burke,
New York

[Peggy]

I fret the day I will have to convert all of my documents over to another program! If there is ever a solution that will enable us to continue using AppleWorks (other than keeping our old computers), please let me know!

It is worth looking for options for the future. The new database, Bento by FileMaker, is touted by some as a replacement for AppleWorks. I don't think so, but that's my opinion. At this time, Bento only imports csv files, but the moderator on their forum has said she sees the concensus is that direct import of AppleWorks databases is needed. Whether or not that actually makes it into a future version will have to be seen.

For now, though, AppleWorks runs well on the newest Macs with the newest OS, so it will be a long time before we will have to keep an "old computer" around just to run AppleWorks.

[Eric Wieczorek]

Hi Peggy

As a business owner, it is simply too stressful to rely on software that could stop working at any time (and probably will cease to function at some point). Apple has officially stated that they will no longer support AW, so if the next time I do a software update that might be the end of the line.

Also, I have installed Leopard as an experiment on a partition and funny things are happening with printing and graphics re AW files. The graphics do not print out at all (I'm using the same driver as in Tiger) and the printer is a lot slower. I briefly looked in the help menu and it talks about Leopard using a new way of printing all files via pdf via the best settings (and there does not seem to be any way to change this.)

As a business owner, I don't have time to fool around with workarounds for AW. It makes me so mad at Apple after having supported the company for so long and spend many thousands of dollars doing so. Its such a poor way for them to treat their customers.

[Dave49]

...OpenOffice? It's a complete suite from Sun Microsystems. And it's free.

~Dave

[penwith]

I sympathise with all those who lament the demise of AW. Like them I deeply regret Apple's action, and have sought alternatives - and have been unsuccessful. I have just completed a design for a simple membership database in AW, and am very pleased with the result. This was after trying the same on Bento. The result with the latter was very polished, quite elegant, but totally inflexible compared with AW. Bento has none of the functions that can be applied to AW's calculation fields. What capability it does have is limited to those of a simple four function calculator.

Iv'e tried iWork, particularly Pages, and while it is a good WP, I still find myself reverting to AW. The same applies with my evaluation of Nisus and Mellel. iWorks spreadsheet is a good alternative to Excel, but I don't see anyone conversant with Excel migrating to iWork.

A number views I have read suggest merging Bento with the iWork suite, restoring much of AW's capability. I would argue this is not the best approach for the reasons outlined above. I would much prefer to see Apple take AW's database module and integrate into iWork.

As I mentioned earlier I have just completed an AW database, a task accomplished smoothly without any machine problems. I am using an Intel 24 inch iMac running Leopard OS X v10.5.5 with 4Gb of memory. There is no reason at present for me to stop using AW, it remains as fast and stable as ever - a highly reliable piece of software.