Over the past month I've started the process of reducing my Google usage. Google Docs/Sheets had been my goto for my fairly rudimentary document needs. I figured I'd try using AppleWorks GS and see if that could be a replacement.

The first use case was writing something small (a couple hundred words) for Juiced.GS. AppleWorks worked just fine here -- I didn't need formatting or anything complicated, the document was short, there was a built-in word count, and the text was easy to read (if a little large). The only (minor) hassle was moving the document back over to my main computer. Normally, I'd wouldn't even use Google Docs to write this (I'd do it in emacs), so this was more of an experiment than anything else. But it worked perfectly well.

The second use case was my monthly bill pay. I have a spreadsheet that has all the bill amounts with a running tally. AppleWorks GS was great for this -- having it on a second screen was convenient and I didn't need to transfer the file at the end.

Given that spreadsheets and word processing were the original killer apps of 8-bit microcomputers their usefulness here shouldn't be suprising. Still, it was a good reminder of how much of the functionality added to modern tools isn't needed for simpler use cases.