Chapter 10. The Home Office: Word Processing, Drawing, and Creating Presentations

IN THIS CHAPTER:

73 Create a New Text Document

74 Type § § & pound ; h r  c rs

75 Use Microsoft Word Documents Without Word

76 Install a New Font

77 Create a Font Collection

When discussing what kinds of things the Mac does well, most people usually mention graphics, video, music, and other such multimedia disciplines. Something that often escapes notice, though, is the Mac's usefulness as a tool for everyday office productivityword processing, diagrams, presentations, spreadsheets, and other such applications that have come to be thought of as strictly the domain of Windows computers and Microsoft software.

Microsoft Office for Mac OS X, which contains Mac-native versions of Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint (as well as Entourage, the Mac version of Outlook), is a fine piece of software; it's the best way to achieve complete compatibility with your Windows-using co-workers. However, Microsoft Office is expensive (as much as $300), and you might find that you can get by with the Office compatibility that's built in to Mac OS X applications that are available for much less cost or free. This chapter looks at a few of the built-in capabilities the Mac has for accomplishing the same tasks your co-workers do in Windows. Even without additional software, Mac OS X gives you the tools to create text documents, read and write Microsoft Word files, process your handwriting into text using a graphics tablet and pen, and manage fonts. Adding AppleWorks or iWorkboth available as commercial packages for less than $100, or bundled free with new consumer-level Macsgives you many additional capabilities, including many that Windows users can't match.

AppleWorks is a venerable productivity suite published by Apple and bundled with many new consumer-class Macs. It contains component applications for word processing, spreadsheets, databases, vector-based drawings, pixel paintings, and presentations. However, AppleWorks's age is showing, and most of its components are rather less than adequate in today's world. Yet it will open Word and Excel documents (as well as documents from other word-processing applications, such as WordPerfect) and save them again using those applications' native formats, allowing you to interact with your colleagues using Microsoft Office's most popular component applications. Furthermore, its vector-based drawing tools (drawings created using shapes like circles and rectangles that you can resize and stack and fill with patterns) are quite useful and well-developed, with no analogous consumer-level equivalent on Windows.

At the time of Tiger's introduction, iWork which contains the applications Pages and Keynote is a new $79 package sold by Apple and billed as an eventual replacement for AppleWorks. However, iWork does not yet contain replacements for any of AppleWorks's components except for the word processing and presentation modes, and it is not bundled free with new Macs. If your computer does not have iWork, or to create other types of documents (drawing, painting, spreadsheets, and so on), AppleWorks remains the de facto standard application on the Mac, although this is expected to change as iWork is further developed in the future.