What is ClarisWorks 4.x?

Good old ClarisWorks. Better in one significant way than MS-Office: there is a 'drawing' style document which is effectively a page layout tool similar to MS-Publisher, but actually usable.

Perfectly serviceable office suite including word processor spreadsheet etc. - all in one program.

At some point Apple took them over and it all became AppleWorks, but that was in a later life.

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It must have been difficult to design an upgrade of ClarisWorks, the best-selling all-in-one program with word processing, spreadsheet, database, painting, drawing, and modem communications features. After all, the program is famous for its clean design. How do you add features without cluttering it up and losing its simplicity, speed, and low hardware requirements?

Very carefully. As with previous upgrades, Claris has created ClarisWorks 4.0 by making dozens of delicate nips and tucks, not dramatic overhauls. Yet after only a few minutes, you become aware of the thought and intelligence behind the new features. For example, since most people spend a lot of time word processing, the best of 4.0 is in the word processor. You can divide your document into sections, each with its own page-numbering scheme, headers and footers, and footnote numbering. You can create an outline in the middle of a document (instead of turning the entire document into an outline). The word-count feature can now tally the words in just a selected patch of text.

To top it off, ClarisWorks 4.0 offers the planet’s best style-sheet feature. A style, of course, is a predefined set of text attributes (bold 1 8-point Palatino, for example); by assigning styles to certain paragraphs of your manuscript, you ensure consistency — and convenience of redesign, since changing a style changes all the text in that style. But in ClarisWorks, styles can apply to every kind of data, not just text. For example, you can create a spreadsheet style that applies a color scheme to selected cells; a graphic Style that applies, say, color and line-thickness settings to a selected object; an outline style that governs the numbering pattern; and so on. All this handiness is easily accessible from the slim, Boating Stylesheet window.

ClarisWorks 4.0 offers more Assistants (automated online guides for creating standard documents — for instance, envelopes, certificates, newsletters, and mailing labels) than previous versions did. You answer a few questions — how many pages in die newsletter, for example — and the program generates a corresponding template document. Just replace the dummy headlines and import text into the boxes, and your design’s complete. (ClarisWorks smoothly opens and saves 22 word processing file formats, including Microsoft Word 4 and 5, WordPerfect, and HTML [for designing World Wide Web pages].) Assistants are generally a joy, although you access them, confusingly, from two different menus.

Together with the rich set of features from previous incarnations of the program — such as the thesaurus, spelling checker, zoom-in and zoom-out buttons, and automatic hyphenation — the new enhancements put ClarisWorks, suddenly, in a league with midrange dedicated word processors like WriteNow and MacWrite Pro. In that light, the omission of System 7.5 drag-and-drop features is surprising — and disappointing.

Other Enhancements

Virtually every annoyance has been removed from the database module: now you can view your data in a spreadsheet-like list view, as you do in Microsoft Works. When creating mailing labels, you can (at last) preview the printout on screen. You can preserve your frequently used search and sort requests, making it easy to call up with one click, say, all your outstanding invoices. Best of all, the ClarisWorks database has inherited from its sibling, FileMaker, several data-input options: check boxes, radio buttons, and pop-up menus, for example. These flexible controls make almost any database layout more functional — and they even show up in the list view.

The drawing and painting modes benefit enormously from another new feature: the Library a floating palette of thumbnail representations of artwork. Not only does the Library provide a convenient WYSIWYG serving tray for the hundreds of clip-art images included with ClarisWorks, but it’s also a perfect place for storing your own logo, letterhead, signature, and so on. One click in the Library inserts the selected item into your document. It gets better: in a typical hurst of innovation, Claris designed the Library to hold text passages and chunks of spreadsheet cells, too, turning it into a kind of all-media glossary. You can create as many Library files as you want, and it’s simple to rename, sort, delete, duplicate, cut, and paste Library elements.

The telecom module of ClarisWorks has been left essentially untouched. Unfortunately, that means you still can’t send or receive files using the quick, intelligent Zmodem method.

The most impressive feature of ClarisWorks 4.0, however, isn’t a change at all: it’s that there’s no change in what counts — speed and low hardware requirements. ClarisWorks feels nimble and powerful, whether on a Power Mac (it’s native) or on a 68020-based Mac (the minimum required). Such responsive software is all too rare in today’s world of behemoth applications. Better yet, ClarisWorks still needs only 1400K of RAM. And with its copious, well-illustrated online help and self-explanatory design, you spend your time doing things, not figuring out how to do them.

The Last Word

ClarisWorks is clearly the best integrated program available. Version 4.0’s word processor and database components can even stand up to the stand-alone programs of the same type. The program’s clean, good-looking interlace helps you combine elements on a single page: adding your logo to a spreadsheet printout, dressing up a letter with a table and border, and so on. Macros and new AppleScript features should make ClarisWorks interesting even to power users. And at $129 list, it would be hard to imagine a better software value.

Pogue, David. (October 1995). ClarisWorks 4.0. Macworld. (pg. 62).

Download ClarisWorks 4.x for Mac

Architecture

68K + PPC (FAT)

System Requirements

From Mac OS 7.0 up to Mac OS 9.2

Compatibility notes

Architecture: 68K (68020 or better) + PPC (FAT)

At least 4MB of RAM

Mac OS 7.0 - Mac OS 9.2.2

 

Emulating this? It could probably run under: Basilisk II