NVMUG eNews August 12 Meeting Report Hartley Jim Jackson presented AppleWorks 6.04
at the NVMUG Meeting
12 Noon - 2 PM
Saturday, August 12, 2000
Community Bank Building, St. Johnsbury
Coming Events
The four Vermont Macintosh user groups, the Stowe Macintosh users, MacChamp in Burlington, Wired Women in Burlington, and NVMUG are sponsoring a Macintosh bake/garage/lawn sale Saturday, September 30, City Hall Park, Burlington. Reserve the date. Plan to bring Macintosh related goods to the sale, and to look for bargains. A part of the proceeds from each sale will go to support the member Macintosh clubs. Adobe has agreed to provide software prizes for a raffle.
The raffle items from Adobe are (1 each):
Adobe Photoshop 5.5
Adobe GoLive 5.0
Adobe LiveMotion 1.0
Adobe Acrobat 4.0
Adobe Illustrator 9,0. More raffle items from other vendors are expected.
Should we renew the MacJam web site? Or, asking the question another way, Will there be a MacJam next year? The question is whether within the four clubs there ia anyone with the time and ability to spearhead the effort. Unfortunately for us, if not for him, Geof can no longer do most of the work because he lives too far away. Midge will see if she can find the person we need. But, if you would like to volunteer, you might e-mail her at NVMUG@mac.com.
In this NVMUG eNews
1. Macs in the Park
2. At the Meeting
3. Appleworks 6.04 Presentation
4. Exclusive Interview with Pogue
5. TechTool Pro 1. Macs in the Park
Update to "Mac's in the Park" from Gail , WiredWomen
When: Saturday, September 30th 9am to 3pm
Where: City hall Park in Burlington ($25 reservation, $35 vendor license for the raffle/sale). We will be renting a 20X20 canopy tent ($110.00) in case of rain. You need to bring your own folding tables, priced items for the garage sale and brochures of your group.
There will not be a food sale as the insurance coverage for that would be more than we could afford.
I have a team working on posters & signage and will get them to you in a printable format for you to distribute as soon as possible. Tickets for the raffle have been distributed to some members of WiredWomen and are ready for distribution to your members. Please send me an address so I can get them to you and the amount you wish to be responsible for. The tickets are $1.00 each. (Gail will send these tickets to Midge for NVMUG.)
You can help in three ways- try to find other vendors for donated stuff for the raffle, find ways to advertise the event in local papers/bulletin boards/radio stations and sell those tickets! 2. At the Meeting
At the meeting, Geof remarked that the presence of Apple Macintosh is growing. You see signs of the Macintosh almost everywhere. Vermont Life was in our mailbox when I got home from the meeting, and there was the full page ad for Vermont colleges featuring a student studying out in the snow with skis and ski board nearby. She is studying on an iMac. While we were at the meeting, my wife, Dona, was attending a musical performance by The Junk Man. Among the junk he used as instruments was an old Macintosh. He said that IBM’s don’t make good music.
We have two potential free NVMUG web sites. The first question is what do we want on our web site? Posting the latest newsletter and the notice of coming events could provide periodic change. We might include reviews of books or software provided by sponsors. We might include some formatting or pictures that we are not putting into the text eNews. We might include pictures of some of the regular crew, and a map showing how to get to the meeting place. It may be more fun if it is a group effort with several people who know how to change and add to the web site. Will we need a web master? We are open to all suggestions.
Door prizes were donated by O’Reilly publishing. Warren won AppleWorks 6: The Missing Manual, so he may have to buy AppleWorks 6.04. Richard won the O’Reilly T-shirt, and Midge said it looks good on him.
3. AppleWorks 6.04 Presentation
A special issue of this newsletter contained a review of AppleWorks 6.04, and a review of Appleworks 6: The Missing Manual. There is no reason for me to spend a lot of time describing the presentation. It began showing a drawing module presentation, AppleWorks Can Do It, which was developed using AppleWorks 5 before the last MacJam. You can still make drawing module presentations in AppleWorks 6.
Next there was a presentation prepared using the Presentation module in AppleWorks 6 showing some of the new features in AppleWorks 6. It included both big and little things like the Table Frame and the addition of definitions to the Thesaurus which makes it a lot more useful.
The big difference in AppleWorks 6 is not the added features, it is the design itself which makes it an improved tool to use. The next part of the presentation compared AppleWorks 5 and 6 interfaces.
AppleWorks 6 is not as powerful a word processor as Microsoft Word, and does not meet some publishers’ requirements for producing a book, but it can do all the word processing that most of us will ever need to do. AppleWorks 6 is not as powerful a spreadsheet tool as Excel, but it’s spreadsheet features have been improved, and it can do all of the spreadsheet work most of us will ever need to do. AppleWorks 6 is not as powerful a database as FileMaker Pro, but , again, it can do all of the database work that most of us will ever need to do. Further, it can wrap all of these together in one package using frames in a way that I believe no other program equals. I believe that AppleWorks 6, in either the Macintosh or the Windows version, is a tool that most people can use to produce quality documents, publications and presentations, while saving them a lot of time and money.
It is a shame when people, and schools, pay much more to get added professional capabilities that they will never use. The argument that students should learn on the tools they will use years later in business is false. The concepts, such as of spreadsheets may remain, but yesterdays software is not today's, and today's will have to be relearned tomorrow. 4. Exclusive (One Question) Interview with (David ) Pogue
Subject: Publishing AppleWorks 6: The Missing Manual
=======================
Question ======================
In the Colophon the book says:
"The authors regret to report that they did not write the text of this book in AppleWorks 6; not because it isn’t up to the task, nor that the authors wouldn’t have loved to, but because publishing industry staffers (and
PageMaker) accept nothing but Microsoft Word.
First, I do not believe the authors could love to write the book in the version of AppleWorks available at the time. Second I assume that they were experienced and comfortable working with Microsoft Word, so working with it would be faster than working with a new version of AppleWorks. But, most important, is it true that you could not write a book in AppleWorks 6.0.4?
What would be the problems if a book were written in AppleWorks and
translated using MacLinkPlus?
Answer
Good question. The real problem with using AppleWorks is that even MacLink
Plus doesn't preserve style sheets, which are absolutely vital in book
publishing. You know, subheads, sidebars, captions, and so on.
Actually, there's another important reason: Microsoft Word offers a feature
called revision tracking, which shows the author exactly what I changed when
I was editing, by highlighting them in blue. And then when the author makes
changes and returns the files to me, I see their changes in green. And so
on. It's a fantastic feature that we couldn't do without!
So the bottom line is that yes, AppleWorks makes a delightful word >
processor -- I use it to write my novels -- but in formatting-heavy books >
like these, we really need to style sheet support if we hope to import the
resulting files into PageMaker.
...David
David Pogue, Macworld columnist (www.davidpogue.com)
The Missing Manual series (www.missingmanual.com)
5. TechTool Pro
Micromat produces a free software maintenance program, TechTool 1.2.1 which everyone should have for rebuilding the desktop, zapping PRAM, analyzing your system, getting specs on your machine, and cleaning your floppy drive (which requires a cleaning kit). I have just signed up to help them test a new version 2.
Micromat also produces TechTool Pro 2.5 which is my tool of choice for maintaining my Macintosh Performa. I love them because they actually answered my e-mail questions, and did so promptly. This program has just been upgraded from 2.5.4 to 2.5.5. This will be the last upgrade of TechTool Pro 2.5 because they have now released TechTool Pro 3.
TechTool Pro 3 is more than an improved version of TechTool Pro 2.5. It also includes Virus checking, though I heard that it does not yet check for those macro viruses that can sneak in when you are using Microsoft programs. Techtool Pro 3 also includes tools for diagnosing software conflicts. TechTool Pro 3 also has improved tools for for recovering files from crashed disks. These tools can be used to recover deleted files, so that TechTool Pro 3 has an added capability to shred a file that you want to delete so that it cannot be recovered. And, TechTool Pro 3 has many other improvements like faster optimization and an improved user interface. Next month I will probably buy the upgrade for $49.95.
For more information, or to download TechTool 1.2.1 or the TechTool Pro 2.5.5 upgrade, URL is
