June 26th 1998: ClarisWorks doesn’t get nearly the respect it deserves. For a paltry $99 you can have a modular suite of applications that does everything 90% of users ever need to do with a computer. How many of us actually utilize the power features of fatware like Microsoft Office?

In a recent study by Gartner Group subsidiary Dataquest, ClarisWorks was rated by small business users as more reliable, easier to learn, and offering more value for the money and higher general satisfaction than Microsoft Office.

Originally conceived as an entry-level “do-all” suite that could be bundled with consumer-level Macintosh and Performa computers, ClarisWorks has gracefully evolved into all the “office” most individuals and many small businesses will ever need. Version 5.0 incorporates integrated word processing, painting and drawing, spreadsheet, database, and communications modules, yet you only have to learn one program.

In fact, ClarisWorks became so powerful and versatile that it essentially obsoleted a whole family of freestanding Claris applications like MacWrite Pro, MacPaint, ClarisDraw, and Easy Business Cards. Amazingly, it is able to do virtually everything these programs did, and often a lot more, with a basic application size of just 2.7 MB, and a preferred memory partition of 2,500 KB (will work with 1,800 KB in a pinch). A complete minimal ClarisWorks 5 Office installation occupies a modest 18 MB of hard drive real estate (68 MB for a full install including all clip art and templates).

ClarisWorks, for all practical purposes, is the only program most computer users really need – period, and if I could only have one app on my hard drive, the choice would be a no-brainer. Registered users of MacPaint, MacWrite II, MacWrite Pro, or Easy Business Cards qualify for a lower cost upgrade to ClarisWorks 5 Office.

One of the beauties of ClarisWorks’ evolution has been a gracefully incremental progression. Unlike some applications where each successive version upgrade involves a learning curve little different than learning a new program from scratch (e.g. Word 5.1 to Word 6 to Word 98), a user upgrading from, say ClarisWorks 2 to ClarisWorks 5 would find plenty of new features to play with, but still feel right at home.

ClarisWorks has always been a quintessentially Mac-like application (although a Windows version is available too) with a clean and intuitive interface clearly descended from the classic MacWrite, MacPaint, and MacDraw software applications bundled with the original Macs back in 1984.

ClarisWorks’ elegant simplicity has traditionally been the antithesis of Microsoft’s gratuitous complexity. Microsoft just doesn’t get it with respect to ease of use – defining the latter as “context-sensitive help,” unlike the original Mac programs that had no help at all. They didn’t need it. The whole Mac idea was centred on intuitive interactivity with the machine, which did what you wanted it to in ways that you could fathom.

Microsoft in particular, and PC-oriented software developers in general make software that is hard to use. Then they try to patch it up by adding help systems, which are also difficult to use. Then they try to patch that by adding “wizards” to assist in using use the help system. In Microsoft’s world, the machine drives you, prompting you to do what it tells you what it wants in the order it wants to do it.

Unfortunately, the later versions of ClarisWorks have been afflicted with a creeping case of “context-sensitive-itis” – the new button bar in ClarisWorks 5 being a highly visible example. However, at least these innovations work as you would expect them to on a Mac – i.e. much more elegantly than Microsoft’s corresponding implementations.

The ClarisWorks button bar enables users to build their own desktop “control center,” including custom buttons for launching other applications, documents, and websites, or more than 150 shortcuts. Users can also set up a button bar that will travel with a document – so the right shortcuts are there when needed.

ClarisWorks Assistants (online automated guides for creating standard documents like mailing labels, certificates, newsletters, footnotes, calendars, presentations, etc.) for instance, take you step by step through a process in which you type in answers to dialog box question prompts, from which the Assistant will generate a customized document template. Assistants are somewhat analogical to the Wizards in Microsoft programs but more elegant and flexible. For instance, Wizards can only help you design new documents, while ClarisWorks Assistants can modify existing ones.

A Really Good Word Processor

ClarisWorks’ word processing module can handle anything from informal memos to low-end desktop publishing, and would alone be well worth ClarisWorks’ price of admission as a freestanding program. It is gratifyingly fast on both PowerPC and 680XX Macs, very stable, and includes all the features you would expect in a mid-range word processor, plus outlining, sections, automatic hyphenation, footnotes, tables, text wrap around graphics, thesaurus, superscript and subscript, automatic hyphenation, flexible page numbering, headers and footers, and a variety of page layout options. And ClarisWorks arguably handles stylesheets more elegantly and gracefully than any other word processor, including the Word and WordPerfect behemoths. The only significant shortcoming in ClarisWorks styles is that they can’t be exported in Word format, which is the standard for publishing.

ClarisWorks 5.0 lacks a few of its late sibling MacWrite Pro’s advanced word-processing features, such as mail merge from a merge document, table of contents, auto-kerning of characters, and find and replace on attributes. If these features are among your word processing requirements, you will have to find them in Word, WordPerfect, or Nisus Writer. Other high-end word processing features missing in Claris Works are advanced keyboard command customization, automatic sentence capitalization, spellchecking as you type, “make it fit,” indexing, grammar-checking, revisioning, and small-caps type style, and the spellchecker is pretty rudimentary.

On the other hand, ClarisWorks 5 boasts powerful features that were not included in MacWrite Pro, including drag & drop text editing (which this writer absolutely can’t abide being without); Internet and html-savvy; spreadsheet frames in word processing documents (a spreadsheet frame offers numerous advantages over simple tables, including the ability to perform calculations on the data entered, and the ability to generate charts); easy to use macro support; integrated drawing and painting tools; greatly increased translator support; cross-platform transparency with the Windows version (there was no MacWrite Pro Windows version); basic document password protection; assistants as described above; a Shortcuts palette, where you can click on buttons to execute menu commands; and speech support for MacinTalk or text to speech (via the speech shortcut).

Paint and Draw

ClarisWorks’ Paint module is essentially the old MacPaint program with more features and functions. A serious image editor it’s not, but for creating and manipulating low-end bitmap graphics it’s useful and convenient.

The Draw module is not as powerful as the discontinued MacDraw, but if you need more drawing capability than it provides, you probably want Adobe Illustrator, CorelDraw, or a CAD program.

Spreadsheet

ClarisWorks’ spreadsheet module isn’t Excel, but it’s no slouch either, and for the spreadsheet requirements of many individuals and small business users, Excel is like using a maul hammer to swat flies. ClarisWorks 5 can import and export Excel 3 and Excel 4 files and is considerably easier to learn and more user-friendly than Excel. I am personally in the process of converting my Excel 4 files to ClarisWorks. I simply don’t need Excel’s power and complexity for the sort of spreadsheet work I do. You can transfer ClarisWorks spreadsheets into word processing, drawing, and painting documents. The spreadsheet module also has a chart-creation function.

Database

ClarisWorks’ database module is a bit like a “lite” version of its erstwhile Claris stablemate, Filemaker Pro. The database module’s interface resembles Filemaker’s, providing for a painless upwards migration if you find you need more data management muscle. Because it can only manipulate one data entity at a time, the ClarisWorks module is, strictly speaking, not a true database management system (DBMS), but more of a file manager. However, it includes many Filemaker-Pro-like data input options like checkboxes, radio buttons, and pop-up menus.

Communications

Yes, ClarisWorks even includes a rudimentary data terminal, but it’s nothing to get excited about. Don’t throw Z-Term or MacComCenter off your hard drive. Still, the little terminal would be a lot better than nothing if no other terminal software was available.

Other Notable Features

The Library is sort of a super glossary in which you can store both text and graphics for insertion in ClarisWorks documents with a mouse click. I use the library to apply letterheads, frequently-used boilerplate text, and my scanned signature for faxes. The Library also comes with 900 clip art images.

Internet Support

ClarisWorks 5 itself includes an HTML translator, with support for GIF and JPEG images, background images, and tables. You can use ClarisWorks as a basic HTML editor, and it features ten templates for quickly creating single-page websites with optional background textures. Hyperlinking capabilities are a new feature in ClarisWorks 5.0, with which users can include links to websites within documents, easily link related documents, and create bookmarks to facilitate navigation within larger documents.

The latest version of ClarisWorks 5 Office also includes:

• The web page authoring program Claris Home Page 2.0 Lite, which allows you to create multi-page websites without fooling around with HTML at all.
• JIAN Business Documents (Claris Edition), which provides hundreds of business and official document templates such as agreements, worksheets and checklists covering sales, marketing, finance, accounting, management and operations.
• One-Step Access to the Internet, which allows you to send and receive email from within ClarisWorks using the Internet button bar and access World Wide Web sites with a single click.
• Over 100 built-in functions that can be used in formulas throughout spreadsheet and database documents.

Mac version minimum system requirements are:

• Mac System 7.0.1 or later and a 68020 or newer processor.
• CD-ROM drive
• 8 MB of RAM
• 18 MB of free hard disk space for a minimal install.

Apple has just released a ClarisWorks 5.0v2 Updater, which can be downloaded for free.

According to Apple, the 5.0v2 update fixes 23 bugs in ClarisWorks 5.0 and fixes some problems in the program’s HTML resources. ClarisWorks 5.0v2 will ship with the spectacular new iMac when it debuts on August 19. The program will be renamed “AppleWorks” for inclusion with Mac OS 8.5 in September.

In summary, ClarisWorks 5 Office really is all the office most of us really need – and likely quite a bit more besides. It may be a “jack-of-all-trades-and-master-of-none,” but it comes pretty close to mastery in word processing. In terms of raw value, no other piece of Mac (or Windows) software you can buy even comes close to matching what you get in ClarisWorks for $99 – or less if you’re upgrading.

© 1998 Charles W. Moore. From <http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Aegean/9318/clarisworks.html>