Jul

14

Word Play

Filed Under Applications, Rants, Uncategorized, Views | 2 Comments

Something that comes up a lot for my clients is the collective dislike of most things Microsoft – especially Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Entourage). The current Mac version of this monolithic suite is Office 2008. As Darrell Etherington points out in a recent NY Times article:

Sometimes I swear Office 2008 was just a ploy to get me to install Windows on a Boot Camp partition and run Office 2007. I find command and menu placement to be completely unintuitive and just plain awkward on the Mac version.

Those who use Excel a lot have a special hate on for the suite and continue to keep the older 2004 version around. To make matters worse those business users who require access to Exchange networks for email and calendaring functions have to purchase the more expensive Standard edition which runs over $500 rather than the Home/Student edition of old for $199 and which included 3 licenses and support for this type of system.

The biggest problem seems to be that many users are afraid to move away from Office applications for fear of not being able to share or open documents with and from others. Thank goodness there are alternatives. One is Google Docs – basically online versions of Word, Excel and Powerpoint. Couple that with Google Mail and Google Calendar and you have a full-featured suite of applications – and it’s FREE.

Sometimes it depends on what you want. If you’re looking for a decent word processor, nothing fancy etc.. then you might consider another free alternative – Bean:

Bean is not a replacement for MS Word. It doesn’t do footnotes or pre-defined styles and is only partially compatible with Word’s file formats

However, it does the job for most things. There is also Apple’s iWork 09 Suite and it’s companion iWork.com (still in beta) which comprises three applications: Pages, Keynote and Numbers. These are excellent alternatives to Word, Excel and Powerpoint. Documents created in iWork 09 can be exported to Microsoft’s versions and they in turn can be imported. Microsoft is currently working Office 2010 and supposedly the Mac version will not be coming out at the same time:

Apple Mac users shouldn’t expect to get any of the new features being touted in Microsoft’s Office 2010 in the near future the company has said.

Microsoft has said that the new office suite, announced on Monday, will go on sale in the first half of 2010 for PC users, however isn’t likely to come to the Mac OS until either late 2010 or as far out as 2011.

Yet another alternative is OpenOffice – a free suite of applications very similar to Office from MS. In the meantime I suggest checking out alternatives to the evil empire’s offerings and not to feel boxed in by the marginalization approach Microsoft often takes towards the Mac.

Dec

23

10.5.6 Apple Mail Fix

Filed Under Apple Mail, Apple Updates | Leave a Comment

Apple Mail
A boring title and an unassuming 100th post but an important update to let you know about. If you have updated to 10.5.6 and use Apple Mail you may want to know about this patch released today from Apple – a note about can be found HERE. It is supposed to fix frequent crashes so if your Mail application is experiencing such symptoms click HERE for a direct link to the download. Again, back up your important information before updating/upgrading anything like this.

Jul

23

Plugging Into Apple Mail

Filed Under Advice, Apple Mail, Recommendations, Views | 1 Comment

 email

Many of my clients use Apple’s free email program simply called Mail. Some chose it at the beginning of their experience with OS X and some have made the transition to it from other applications, mainly Microsoft’s Entourage (part of their MS Office suite of applications). The great thing about Mail in its current form since Leopard’s (10.5) release is its tight integration with the other Apple applications such as iCal, Address Book and now MobileMe. The built-in data detection of addresses and dates is cool and it supports Quick Look for fast perusal of attachments. It does, however, have it’s critics.

One major complaint is how it draws those said attachments while composing a message. If you’re attaching a single page PDF or an image of almost any kind, the file will draw itself in the body of the message making it difficult to type around the attachment if it’s been inserted between text or inadvertently somewhere you don’t want. Multi-page PDF’s, text documents etc…draw normally as just icons.

Another complaint is it’s inability to categorize messages without creating a mail box that might correspond to how a message might be filed. Entourage users miss a tighter integration with their calendar and to-do lists. Wouldn’t it be great if Mail could do these things properly?

There is an answer. I use two great plug-in applications with Mail that really extend it’s functionality. One is Mail Attachments Iconizer which helps to draw attachments in particular ways and the other is Mail Tags, an amazing add-on that provides keyword tagging, message notation, colour coding and tight integration with iCal for creating appointments and To-dos on the fly. I won’t go into more detail as you can check out their sites directly.

I also recommend the great Take Control eBook on Apple Mail – they have one for Leopard and one for Tiger.

Please note that I am not affiliated in any way with any companies or products that I recommend.