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NeoOffice 2.2.1 Available For Mac
Posted by
kdawson
on Sun Aug 26, 2007 10:31 PM
from the closer-to-the-platform dept.
from the closer-to-the-platform dept.
VValdo writes "Following a month or so of their Early Access Program, NeoOffice, the free Office suite for OS X, has just released NeoOffice 2.2.1. New features include support for the native Mac OS X spell-checker and address book; support for high-resolution printing (more than the 300 dpi that previous versions allowed); the ability to open, edit, and save most Microsoft Office 2007 Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents; and the latest features from OpenOffice.org 2.2.1, which is the code base for NeoOffice. X11 is not required, but for those of you who actually want to use X11, check out the new RetroOffice."
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NeoOffice 2.2.1 Available For Mac
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Say what? (Score:1, Funny)
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
too little, too late? (Score:4, Informative)
(Last Journal: Friday October 19, @09:21PM)
Re:too little, too late? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:too little, too late? (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://drblast.blogspot.com/)
Re:too little, too late? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:too little, too late? (Score:5, Informative)
I use TeXShop [uoregon.edu] for all of my LaTeX needs. It's not just a LaTeX editor, but also contains an easy-to-use environment to create PDFs on the fly. It is also bundled with a graphical BiBTeX editor to store bibliographies. Way better than the command-line tools that I've used on my old FreeBSD machine :).
As for LaTeX tutorials, I use "The Not So Short Introduction to LaTeX 2E." It's a very good tutorial that will get you started working with LaTeX code. I use LaTeX for all of my research papers except for those that employ the MLA format (LaTeX was designed for scientists and mathematicians, not keeping English and history majors in mind. But sometimes a science/math student needs to write an English paper, and I haven't been satisfied with existing MLA themes for LaTeX). If you must use MLA, just stick with Word.
Re:too little, too late? (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.lyx.org/ [lyx.org]
Re:too little, too late? (Score:5, Interesting)
Finally, I opened the document in OpenOffice and was able to easily fix all of the problems with margins and footnotes and I printed the final copies from OpenOffice. It would have saved me a lot of time to have started the project in OpenOffice.
For writing papers, check out Mellel (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://www.lkmc.ch/)
I use Mellel [redlers.com] for papers and the like. If the thing you're writing is highly structured (wich chapters and footnotes and endnotes and citations), nothing beats Mellel, in my opinion. It's small, cheap, fast, and does everything you would want, easily. Rearrange chapters? Drag and drop them in the outline. Change the font of all second level chapters? Easy. Multiple languages? No problem, even mixing rtl and ltr.
I know I sound like a shill, but I'm actually a paying customer and have no ties - financial or otherwise - to the company making Mellel. Check the app out. It's one of the reasons I use a Mac.
Re:too little, too late? (Score:4, Informative)
After purchasing my MacBook last year (I was previously a Windows and *nix user, now my Mac is my sole computer), I tried (and eventually purchased iWork 06. I love Keynote (I bought it solely for Keynote, in fact) and believe that Keynote > PowerPoint > OO Impress, but I'm just not really into Pages no matter how many times I've used it. I like the concepts of styles and use LaTeX for all of my non-MLA papers, but whenever writing any other type of document, I prefer the more "free" structure of Word/OO Writer/AbiWord/etc. to Pages's strict enforcement of styles. My biggest problem with iWork (don't know about iWork 2008, however) is its very imperfect compatibility with MS Office file formats. The basics are correct, but anything that requires tables, exact layout, more complex styles, etc. starts to look jarbled. So, I like iWork a lot (much speedier than MS Office 2004 due to my having an Intel Mac, not to mention cheaper [$49 vs $149 for students]), but for perfect compatibility, I don't trust it.
I've also tried NeoOffice on my machine. As stated earlier, I vastly prefer Writer to Pages. NeoOffice was a necessity to me because of its spreadsheet (iWork 06 doesn't have a spreadsheet; that changed with iWork 08; I still need to try it). NeoOffice's compatibility with MS Office documents is superb, and I use NeoOffice to open and save documents where compatibility is very important. However, my complaint with NeoOffice is its speed (it is dog slow on my 1.83GHz Core Duo MacBook with 512MB RAM, but I plan on upgrading to 2GB). The fact that the widgets are non-native and fake-looking do not add to the problem, either.
Personally, I'm waiting for MS Office 2008 to come out (finally a native version for Intel Macs). However, if iWork 08 is a major improvement with compatibility, or if NeoOffice makes big improvements with speed and its interface, then I might not have to shell out the cash.
Re:too little, too late? (Score:5, Interesting)
I think Pages has been and is misrepresented as a word processor. It's really a page-design and layout tool. Rather than "Apple's word processor" I think of it as "Indesign lite".
Keynote, of course, stomps Powerpoint in almost every possible way.
Re:too little, too late? (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://honeypot.net/ | Last Journal: Friday April 07 2006, @09:33AM)
I'd gladly buy it if it supported ODF. But if I'm going with something other than MS Office, it's at least going to use open standards that the rest of the world is migrating to. Seriously, the iWorks formats have all the lock-in of Office but none of the ubiquity. What's the point in that?
Re:too little, too late? (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://honeypot.net/ | Last Journal: Friday April 07 2006, @09:33AM)
How is that a troll? I don't want proprietary formats, and I just don't see the logic in creating new ones when ODF pretty much has word processing covered. If I were OK with proprietary formats, I'd chose the one that 95% of the population uses, not one that will only let me interact with a small subset of users of a still relatively little-used OS. I have a Mac and I wouldn't hesitate to buy iWork if it didn't mean being locked in yet again.
Re:too little, too late? (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.bside.com/)
Seriously, the iWorks formats have all the lock-in of Office but none of the ubiquity.
The huge difference between the iWorks formats and Office formats is that the iWorks formats are sane and well documented XML:
[apple.com]http://developer.apple.com/documentation/AppleAppl ications/Conceptual/iWork2-0_XML/Chapter02/chapter _2_section_4.html [apple.com]
So, while it's true that iWorks is the only real option for editing them now, it shouldn't be too hard to convert them in the future - you can probably get them into ODF with some simple scripts, or potentially even simple XSL transforms.
this cures the symptoms but not the disease (Score:4, Interesting)
What it doesn't do is answer the basic question of why we need another set of document formats. We've heard this story before and we've always hated it. However, I'd love to hear from Apple about why TextEdit in Leopard supports ODF and iWork does not.
It's useful to know that Apple has kept the iWork file formats well-documented so far. Given that, there's a chance that NeoOffice will eventually read and write iWork files, and there's a chance that iWork will read and write ODF. We can always hope for both, of course.
If you're happy enough to waste your time converting documents backwards and forwards, feel free to do it again. I'd rather not encourage this sort of behaviour, personally. Eventually, someone else will work around the problem for you, so that when you have to put up with this sort of nonsense, you probably won't even notice. Hey, it's happened before.
Torrent? (Score:2)
(Last Journal: Sunday August 26, @11:54PM)
Neo Office (Score:2)
(http://homepage.mac....mato/Wheatpaste.html)
Framemaker (Score:3, Insightful)
With properly defined templates prior to writing, it's a snap. Though you could spend a while making 'standardized templates'. I'm a professional tech writer and author many documents (think User's Guides, Service Guides etc..) for a large computer company. There's a dozen of us on the team and this makes it easy to bring a new techwriter up to speed.
The best part, what you see on the screen is exactly what gets printed out. Framemaker has it's place. For making a quick document not really, but for more "industrial efforts" it's definitely better than both word and open/star/neo office.
Bandwidth abuse? (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://www.artboy.org/)
I mean, out of 152MB for the PPC download, 20MB of that was source code that only.01% of the users will ever even glance at out of curiosity.
iWork, not iWorks (Score:2)
(http://macwereld.nl/)
iWork, not iWorks
Excel, not Excell
Word, not Words
Is this an inheritance of the "MS Works" suite?
NeoOffice opens its web site on launch (Score:3, Informative)
(http://slashdot.org/)
I finally gave up on NeoOffice for a reason which sounds sort of trivial, but over time came to annoy me so much that I couldn't stand it any longer.
Whenever I launch NeoOffice, my web browser pops to the front and some stupid NeoOffice web page loads. I've never looked at the page; it may be something very important, but I find this sort of behaviour so annoying that I always close it as it's loading. A program should do what you tell it to. This stupid business with windows always opening and seizing focus as side-effects of other things is exactly why I hate the Windows interface, and I sure don't want it on my Mac.
I searched on the web and never found a way to disable this nuisance, so I gave up and switched to OpenOffice.org's version.
iWork? (Score:2, Funny)
NeoOffice is the best FOSS office package for Macs (Score:1)
(http://ajiva.blogspot.com/)
I've used NeoOffice for a little over 1 1/2 years. I have found that the interoperability with M$ Office is excellent, which is important to me as I am a health care consultant and work in environments that use Windows and M$ Office exclusively. There are many complaints that the application is slow but I have not found this to be the case. It is slower to launch than Word or Excel and it takes a bit longer to open a document, but that costs me maybe four minutes a day. Drinking less coffee will often lessen the annoyance people feel over these things. In actual use, NeoOffice looks and feels mostly like a Mac application. The major difference is in how preferences are managed, which is radically not Mac-like.
There are several issues in NeoOffice which are inherited from the OpenOffice.org project that cause performance bottlenecks. The NeoOffice team has been methodically replacing them, resulting in an application that is faster with each iteration. Hopefully that trend will continue. In the meantime, I find NeoOffice perfectly usable on a daily basis in my job.
odf support (Score:1, Troll)
(http://lives.sourceforge.net/)
Where's the love? (Score:1)
NeoOffice rocks. (Score:3, Informative)
(http://wheatwilliams.com/)
If you use it, please donate a couple of $10 bills to their efforts through PayPal on their web page. I've made several small donations to them over the past three years and I think it was money well spent.
Ditch the office reference (Score:1)
(Last Journal: Friday September 17 2004, @04:10PM)
iWorks is no better. I don't want to be reminded about WORK by all these products when I'm using it at home.
TextEdit would be a great name.
Native OpenOffice (Score:2)
(http://www.gamerwiki.com/)
Re:also of interest to mac users: (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.pembo13.com/)
Re:also of interest to mac users: (Score:2)
(Last Journal: Monday July 17 2006, @03:45PM)
Re:AppleWorks compatibility? Computer says no... (Score:3, Informative)
(http://wheatwilliams.com/)