First Touch: AppleWorks 6

My copy arrived last week. As readers know, I am high on ClarisWorks (renamed AppleWorks) as it has been my most-used productivity suite for a long time. I've looked forward to AppleWorks 6 (AW6) as a major upgrade. I was hoping to spend a lot of time with the new version this weekend. Unfortunately, my car and house chores needed almost all of my free time. Still, I loaded it on a couple of my test computers (a 7300/180 w/315 MHz G3 and a G4/400(s)) and briefly checked it out.

I had been forewarned from other articles that an older version of QuickTime is installed so I did a Custom Install and checked everything but QuickTime. The installer worked quickly and flawlessly. Launching AW6 was surprisingly fast. Other articles had stated that AW6 is really slow but not so to my eye. I even launched AW5.0.4 to compare and I don't see a difference.

I really like the new initial interface and the design in general. However, much of the interface is unchanged which is good for familiarity. The automatic update feature kicked in automatically and a number of new templates downloaded--impressive. The word processor's toolbar with a gillion little icons does not run the full width of the application's window as in previous versions. I've rarely used more than a few of the icons so this simplification is welcome. Icons can be added to the toolbar or deleted as needed which is the way to do it. Using the word processor was no slower but no faster than AW5.0.4 in side-by-side comparisons. I wonder why so many emails posted on other web sites claim that AW6 is exceptionally slow? I did encounter one missing feature that I really will miss--the font type and size are not displayed on the toolbar as in previous versions. One can put icons for these two bits of information on the toolbar but one has to click them to see the information.

Previous versions of AW had a fairly complete set of translators. I mostly converted quickly and easily between AW and WordPerfect, however, there were no translators for MS Office 98. Another negative about AW6 is the paucity of translators. Not only are there none for MSO 98 but there are none for WordPerfect. I hope Apple will provide those translators in the near future. Otherwise, people will have to rely on the third party product.

One has to remember that AW6 is aimed at K-12 education and general consumers, maybe SOHO. I think it competes well with MSO 98 but it's not intended to do so. AW6 blows away it's Windows counterpart, Microsoft Works, in features and ease of use. For under $100 (only $39 for education buyers), I think Apple still has a winner but I will withhold judgement until I get a better chance to check out and compare all the components.