By Felicia Sternbach
AppleWorks 6: The Missing Manual
By Jim Elferdink, David Reynolds
May 2000
ISBN: 1-56592-858-X
452 pages, $19.95
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/aplwrksmm/index.html
And I thought I knew AppleWorks! AppleWorks is Apple’s all inclusive productivity suite. It includes a word processor, spreadsheet, database, paint, draw, and presentation (slide show) applications. It is a powerful program, and I had always found that I could accomplish all of what I needed in the drawing and spreadsheet programs. Having used the program from version 3 on (it is now up to 6.2.9), I felt pretty confident with it. I was able to coax greeting cards, flyers, signs, (for the bulletin boards I put up during my previous life as an art teacher), art supply and tech orders, address lists and lots of lesson plans, etc., out of the program.
 AppleWorks 6 the Missing Manual, provides all the basics and lots of additional information and many tips and hints on how to better use the apps.
When I needed to create certain items like business cards, AppleWorks provides several assistants and templates. These are editable and you can make some awesome things with them in AppleWorks. There are many things in AppleWorks that I had avoided in Appleworks that I had avoided simply because I didn’t have the time to research how to accomplish the task. Things like style sheets and formulas in spreadsheets. This book did provide a good description about these. But....all those words.....! It went slowly.
The format of the book flows well with a general description of AppleWorks, followed by chapters which go into each part of the total suite. These are followed by a Section for Power Use and one on Integrating the Apps into your work flow.
Each chapter is well laid out, simply written and includes offset boxes with illustrations with specific descriptions. Each page also has ‘tips’ boxes. There are so many tips, that I am going to have to keep the book by my computer and memorize a few a day.
One of the things I do a lot is create templates. You can create documents and save them as templates for repeated similar tasks. That way you don’t have to start from scratch each time.
The chapter flowed well in its description of what is available and how to use them. However, if a beginner was using the book, there may be items that are a bit vague. For instance, in the ‘Power User’s Clinic’ box it describes how to save a template. It tells you to : to save a template. It tells you to : “save into the Appleworks 6 -> Starting Points-> Templates Folder.” Someone new to Mac would not have a clue where this is or how to get there. The average newbie to AppleWorks will have to do a bit of searching to find the folder in the AppleWorks folder in the Applications folder in the Hard Drive. It is a simple task to learn, but will take some precious time the first time out.
I was definitely impressed with all the in-depth explanations available.
But I have to admit that I am a VERY visual person. I like a LOT of pictures and tend to get bogged down when I see that I have to read a lot of words.
I am also partial to color and this one is in black and white.
In addition the illustrations are still in OS 9 which may confuse some people new to Mac and using OS X.
I found the book a little dry, even thought the authors have injected a bit of humor here and there. I don’t recommend it as cover to cover reding material like a novel, but as a good general reference book.....Appleworks 6...The Missing Manual will provide you with many answers to many of your questions.
June 2004
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