Review: MacLinkPlus Deluxe 16
- Article 52 of 89
- MacFormat, July 2007
The Rosetta Stone for files gets a few new features.
File formats used to be the bane of everyone’s lives. Consolidation, standardisation and the introduction of filters to programs that allowed them to read other programs’ files has largely changed that. But there’s still been a small place for MacLinkPlus Deluxe as a way to cope with stragglers, Luddites and iconoclasts.
It sells itself as the ultimate file translation utility – “Translate virtually any file regardless of where it comes from” – and includes translators for a huge number of word processing, spreadsheet, database, graphics, compression and encoding formats for both Windows and Mac, although some of these translators only work in one direction. Simply drag and drop your files onto the program or use the Finder contextual menu plug-in that comes with it. Then choose which format to translate the files into, providing MacLinkPlus recognises it, or simply accept the defaults. On top of the conversion features, it also includes functions for extracting text from PDFs, converting documents to an iPod-friendly format and icWord and icExcel for viewing Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Apple/ClarisWorks files if you don’t have a copy of Microsoft Office. There are also many ways to set defaults and customise output names and destinations.
How useful this is depends on how often you receive files you can’t read or need to send files in a particular format you can’t output from your normal programs. MacLink does do a reasonable job of converting files, although it often had a few glitches in our tests, particularly when decompressing archives.
But is it really worth the $79 asking price? Not especially. For existing users, there are few reasons to pay the upgrade price despite the two-and-a-half years since the previous version came out. It hasn’t been upgraded to Universal Binary status, some older translators have actually been removed and the new Office 2007 translator is one-way, so you can’t save in the new formats only translate them, something not especially useful given the plethora of free translators already available, including the official one from Microsoft.
If you frequently need to translate strange files, it might be worth it to you. Otherwise, save your money.