MacLinkPlus Deluxe painlessly translates a bewildering array of proprietary document types, regardless of whether they were created on or intended for use with a Mac or a Windows PC, The venerable file-translation utifity has undergone many changes in version 11. It now has the abihty to work with files created with AppleWorks 5 and WordPerfect 3.5 on the Mac, as well as files from Word and Excel 2000 for Windows. It also supports files compressed with StuffIt 5.
Translating files with MacLinkPlus couldn’t be simpler. Just double-click a mystery PC file, or even a Mac file created by a program you don’t have on your hard drive. Working in conjunction with the Mac OS’s File Exchange control panel, MacLinkPlus examines the file and fists programs that can open it. Some choices seem to come from out of left field; MacLinkPlus suggested opening a JPEG graphics file with Apple DVD Player and SoundApp, among others. This is because MacLinkPlus lists all programs that can conceivably work with the file, not just the best candidates. Double-click your choice and MacLinkPlus translates and opens it with the selected program.
Translating to foreign file formats — so that a Windows user can open your AppleWorks 5 spreadsheets in Excel 2000, for example — is just as simple. Drag the file(s) onto the MacLinkPlus icon and click Translate. (If you want to look inside the file’s structure first, the View feature works well — especially with graphics, provided you have QuickTime installed.) MacLinkPlus is smart enough not to accidentally translate a word processor file into a graphic, or do anything else that would send your Mac into an apoplectic fit. When you are translating files with special formatting, however, the results can be uncertain. For example, converting a Word 98 document with a table into a Nisus Writer file separated the table into paragraphs. Likewise, a WordArt file came through as nothing at all. The more complex your file and the more application-specific features you employ in your documents, the greater the chance that MacLinkPlus will produce an unexpected result, so it’s always best to double-check the translations.
In previous versions of MacLinkPlus, you could convert files just by choosing Save As from the File menu in many Mac programs, selecting the desired format, and then sitting back as MacLinkPlus translated the file while it saved to disk. Now you must save the file in your application’s native format, then convert it manually with the MacLinkPlus appfication. This extra step slows down what used to be a straightforward process. Likewise, handling files downloaded from the Internet could be streamlined. While MacLinkPlus supports CPT (Compact Pro), GZIP, SIT (Stufttt 5), TAR, and ZIP compressed files, preparing files that are both compressed and encoded — which the freeware Stuffit Expander can handle all at once — is a two-step process. You must first decode the BinHexed or encoded file, then decompress it separately.
The program’s online help is easy to access and details each of MacLinkPlus’s functions and how to use them. The Preferences window is well designed, and even lets you designate default formats for different file types. For example, you can instruct MacLinkPlus to translate all word processing files into Nisus Writer 4 format.
If you exchange a lot of files with PC users or you often encounter Mac files created by programs you don’t have, MacLinkPlus Deluxe 11.0 is an essential utility. Except for particularly exotic formats, you’ll never again be unable to open those oddball files. Apple used to bundle MacLinkPlus translators as part of the operating system, up until Mac OS 8.5, so you may unknowingly have much of the functionality already sitting in your System Folder. Depending on your particular requirements, you may not need to upgrade to the latest version of MacLinkPlus at all.
Shuchat-Marx, Mark D. (December 1999). MacLinkPlus Deluxe 11.0. MacAddict. (pg. 76).
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Applications
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2014-04-14 / 
2020-08-12 / 
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MacLinkPlusDeluxe11.zip
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
SheepShaver
