MacLinkPlus Deluxe 16
Product Review
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Price: $79.99 (less if you are upgrading from the prior version)
Pros: This conversion program has come in very handy many times, allowing me to open otherwise inscrutable files received in e-mail.
Cons: With each new recent version, including Version 16, MacLinkPlus drops out some lesser used translators for older programs.
Product Rating
Impressive
by Robert King, AAUG Member
All and all, I wouldn’t be without MacLinkPlus, and have had, and used, earlier versions for many years. Version 16 was just released in May 2007 and builds on Version 15 that came out in the fall of 2004. Version 16’s biggest change is in adding great new translation power for Word 2007, Excel 2007, and WordPerfect x3 for Windows. For instance, for Word 2007, Version 16 translates character and paragraph formatting, auto-numbering and bullets, tables, headers and footers, footnote and endnotes, graphics and a lot more. For Excel 2007 files Version 16 similarly lets you translate all the structural and formatting features (even shading) as well as the contents of cells. Though, I have not yet had to use any of these latest features, I expect that they should work just as well as the great conversion features for other programs found in earlier versions of MacLinkPlus.
Version 16 (like 15) really has some other very nice features. It allows you to extract text from PDF files, plus it has good translators for most popular graphic file formats, like JPG, PICT, TIFF, and others. All and all, there is little that it cannot tackle - and open - for you.
In terms of how it operates, once it is installed through a download from the MacLinkPlus site or from a purchased CD, you can create a desktop (or tool bar) icon. You can then drag files onto it, with the program window opening to reveal a range of translation or viewing functions in a small toolbar that is displayed. You can learn most times what the program is to be translated or decompressed, and you can also view it rather than translating and saving it into another format that you can choose. There are further toolbar features you can select including “quicktips” offering suggestions and then a button to “send to iPod.” Not having an iPod, I really cannot comment on how well that works, but assume it will facilitate the moving of music files from your computer to your iPod as nicely and easily as MacLinkPlus otherwise works for other programs.
Those are a summary of the good points, and as I say, I wouldn’t be without this wonderful product. However, I will point out what is a somewhat annoying pattern for MacLinkPlus for the last 10 years, and has happened again with Version 16. Since Version 9 that came out in 1996, MacLinkPlus has gradually drops out less used translators for a few older programs. The latest loss is that Version 16 no longer supports Stuffit. Similarly, I was also puzzled three years ago when Version 15 dropped support for Mac OS 9 or lower. In all, this pattern of dropping translators for older, less used programs is a bit annoying at times and has left me with a few really old Mac disks that I cannot open. While this annoyance probably only bothers a very small percentage of MacLinkPlus users, it may explain why this otherwise wonderful product occasionally won’t help you with some really old archived file.