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Software Businesses Apple

Alternatives To Office For Mac OS X 232

Posted by Zonk from the anything-but-clippy dept.
imatt writes "From eWeek's article on MS Office Alternatives for Mac: 'Major milestones were recently announced for two Mac OS X-compatible software suites that could provide an alternative to the near-ubiquitous Microsoft Office...NeoOffice/J uses a standard Mac OS X installer, presents native Aqua menus, does not require Mac OS X users to install and use X11 software, uses Mac OS X fonts and has native printing support.' Most [options] seem to be open source, which is good for the programming community and better for the Apple user."
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Alternatives To Office For Mac OS X More

Alternatives To Office For Mac OS X

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  • NeoOffice/J (Score:4, Informative)

    by LochNess ( 239443 ) on Saturday June 25, 2005 @12:53AM (#12907408) Homepage
    I have NeoOffice/J installed on my PowerBook, and it works pretty well. It's a bit slow, but definitely functional, and it has loaded every Office document I have asked it to.

    • Re:NeoOffice/J (Score:4, Informative)

      by Soko ( 17987 ) on Saturday June 25, 2005 @01:12AM (#12907490) Homepage
      Try one locked with a password. If it's like OOo, it more or less says "Sorry - one of your cow-orkers was a m0r0n and made this document unavailable."

      I get really irritated with the dominance of MS Office at times.

      Soko
      • OpenOffice2 seems to open files with passwords...

      • Re:NeoOffice/J (Score:3, Informative)

        by Bert64 ( 520050 )
        Older versions of OO just ignored the password and opened the file anyway, since the password was just stored in a header and the rest of the document was stored unmodified (no encryption, nothing)..
        The password stored in the header was encrypted with a proprietory algorythm, and it was easier to ignore it than reverse engineer it..
        They dropped this support for fear of the DMCA.. tho i would like a patch to bring it back anyway :)

    • Re:NeoOffice/J (Score:3, Insightful)

      by fm6 ( 162816 )

      ...it has loaded every Office document I have asked it to.

      Yeah, but has it loaded it accurately? Are all the tables in your word processor docs properly formatted? Do the bar charts in your spreadsheet look the same? How about your PowerPoint slides? And when you save your changes, do people who open your files in Office complain that they're all messed up?

      If you just want to work on your own, there are plenty of decent Office alternatives. But if you want to share files with the huge Office user base

      • Re:NeoOffice/J (Score:3, Informative)

        by binford2k ( 142561 )

        Yeah, but has it loaded it accurately? Are all the tables in your word processor docs properly formatted? Do the bar charts in your spreadsheet look the same? How about your PowerPoint slides?

        Yes.

        And when you save your changes, do people who open your files in Office complain that they're all messed up?

        No.

        If you just want to work on your own, there are plenty of decent Office alternatives. But if you want to share files with the huge Office user base, you have to use Office yourself, period.

        So

      • "Yeah, but has it loaded it accurately? Are all the tables in your word processor docs properly formatted? Do the bar charts in your spreadsheet look the same? How about your PowerPoint slides?"

        If it's accuracy you want, then you need a document format which is designed to store documents accurately. .DOC isn't it. Your documents will look different on every implementation (both of MS-Offfice, OpenOffice, Abiword, and Pages), different on every computer (assuming they don't have identical fonts and scree
      • ...um, or you could all just use NeoOffice on all new projects. The cost benefit alone would be worth it. How "entrenched" you seem to be that you don't even consider the alternative.

        • Re:NeoOffice/J (Score:3, Insightful)

          by fm6 ( 162816 )
          I'm not "entrenched". I'm simply having to deal with real-world issues. Most real workplaces are full of Office users and the files they've created. If you've never had to deal with people who don't want to relearn all their Office skills, or with all the files they've created, you've probably never had a real job.
    • If only it would/could install without root perms. I hate apps that don't offer that as an option since to have root at work I have to use my Linux bootable cd to bypass the Mac's security and that is probably not a good career choice so I've avoided doing it.

      • Re:NeoOffice/J (Score:3, Informative)

        by bnenning ( 58349 )
        Use Pacifist or extract it from the package directly with pax. It's a single .app bundle so there's no reason it should have an installer, but for some reason lots of Unix and Windows ports insist on using them.

  • Both options are great (Score:5, Informative)

    by AKAImBatman ( 238306 ) * <akaimbatman@gmaYEATSil.com minus poet> on Saturday June 25, 2005 @12:56AM (#12907420) Homepage Journal
    As a Mac user, I have to say that both Office v.X and NeoOffice/J are excellent options. Microsoft gave Office v.X the full Aqua treatment, and even made certain that the interface was more consistent with the OS X desktop than with the Windows Desktop.

    That said, NeoOffice/J is my personal favorite. While it hasn't looked very "lickable" up until recently, I've found it to be far more user friendly, and overall quite stable. (With one of the best document rescue implementations I've ever seen! If something bad happens, it still usually manages to stop, save the file to disk, then dump its core. Amazing.) IMHO, I couldn't do articles without it.

    • Re:Both options are great (Score:5, Interesting)

      by corporatemutantninja ( 533295 ) on Saturday June 25, 2005 @01:28AM (#12907542)
      I've been using v.X, and while the functionality is there something down deep isn't quite right. My Powerbook runs hotter if any of the MS apps are running, even in the background, so even idling they're hitting the processor hard. Worse, with Tiger my Powerbook FREQUENTLY gets tied up paging the harddrive, and I'm pretty sure it correlates to whether the MS apps are running or not. In particular Entourage (i.e. Outlook for OS X) is a piece of garbage. Quitting Entourage often seems to clear the carburetors out for me. Again, got much worse with Tiger, so I'm hoping (but not exactly holding my breath) for an update.
      • My Powerbook runs hotter if any of the MS apps are running, even in the background, so even idling they're hitting the processor hard.

        Hey, that's the Wintel world. Each new MS version requires a speedier Intel processor. Welcome to YOUR new world, Apple is joining it without the push from Redmond, but Intel stays the same. You have to upgrade baby, and your system will remain slow.....

      • Re:Both options are great (Score:5, Interesting)

        by elbobo ( 28495 ) on Saturday June 25, 2005 @03:03AM (#12907782)
        Spotlight's indexing processes are also a *major* culprit in Tiger's slowdowns and lockups. I'm at the end of my tether with those, which is really sad as I love Spotlight and use it all the time.

        Tiger's also more of a memory hog than Panther, sadly, so performance is going to suffer more often in Tiger simply due to memory exhaustion.

        If 10.4.2 doesn't fix at least the Spotlight issues I'm going to start losing my good feelings towards Apple. Bah humbug.
        • Did you update your Panther installation, or install Tiger to a clean partition? If you did update, can you take a look at how fragmented your files are with Disk Warrior?

          Last I checked Disk Warrior wasn't Tiger compatible, but it will show the general health of the data layout on a partition. Mine were in a real bad state due to the upgrade, with Activity Monitor showing frequent use of 70% proc resources.

          I wiped a second hard drive (which only contained backup data, no outright loss), clean install

      • The only times my OSX machine has ever crashed have been due to ms apps, word, excel and "remote desktop connection".. When i don't run any of those apps, the machine remains up for months on end..
      • Have you turned off autocorrect spelling and grammar? I noticed that with any document open and those two options checked, Word v.X would take up at least 50% of the CPU. I haven't tried turning them back on in Office 2004 to see if that bug was fixed.

  • Apple extending iWork? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 25, 2005 @12:57AM (#12907427)
    There is always the possibility that Apple will extend iWork as a replacement for AppleWorks which is a bit long in the tooth now. So thinks the AppleWorks User Group: http://www.awug.org/misc/iwork_iwug.html/ [awug.org]
    • " There is always the possibility that Apple will extend iWork as a replacement for AppleWorks which is a bit long in the tooth now."

      If anyone is considering office-software on the Mac, then iWork is definitely something you want to look at. It [Pages] is a decent word processor, loads and saves Word files well enough that you can use them, exports as PDF, and has fairly nice stylesheet support.

      There's a demo version pre-installed on all new Macs, and costs £50 (which is only £20 more than St

  • Why does Apple need office, anyways? (Score:4, Informative)

    by ChllaPk ( 894890 ) <icyhypercube@gmail.com> on Saturday June 25, 2005 @12:58AM (#12907428)
    I've used Appleworks on every Mac that I've owned, never had a compatability problem yet. You can easily convert most files back and forth between Office and Appleworks, and it has just about every feature that Office does.

    • Re:Why does Apple need office, anyways? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Graymalkin ( 13732 ) * on Saturday June 25, 2005 @02:10AM (#12907653)
      AppleWorks is a nice suite if all you need to do is work with files you've created and work with and only need rudimentary Word and Excel support. When you start needing more advanced features that Office has AppleWorks begins to look extremely basic.

      Two excellent examples of this are change tracking and comments. There's no comparable feature in AppleWorks for these. In networked environments these features of Office are seeing more and more use. If several users all edit the same document at different times being able to track the changes made to said document is extremely important. This couples well with the ability to make out of channel comments about the document that travel with it.

      If you're trying to switch a business and their existing document base over from Windows PCs to Macs you're going to need software with not just good but excellent Office compatibility. You can't replace a tool with a new one that does half as much as the old.

  • OO.org Vs Neo (Score:3, Insightful)

    by siplus ( 796514 ) on Saturday June 25, 2005 @01:00AM (#12907438) Homepage
    I have been using my first mac (powerbook) for almost a month now, and i can say that NeoOffice/J does a much better job for a user in mac os x than the X11 version of OpenOffice.

    Since Neo is based on OpenOffice, and I am familiar with it from my use of Linux and Windows, Neo is simply the best choice!

    The only bad part; There won't be an implementation of a native version of OpenOffice 2.0 for awhile.

    I'm not sure if this is because of my experience in high school, but i like the simplistic layout of MS word more than OOo 1.1 writer. I prefer the OOo 1.9 writer and 1.9 presentation layout; but don't see these coming to the Mac very soon (outside of the X11 implementation)

    • Apple's fault (Score:3, Interesting)

      by cahiha ( 873942 )
      I have been using my first mac (powerbook) for almost a month now, and i can say that NeoOffice/J does a much better job for a user in mac os x than the X11 version of OpenOffice.

      That's Apple's fault: they are putting roadblocks in the way of people trying to do a better job with X11 integration on Macintosh. The OOo developers got so annoyed with Apple's behavior that they stopped working on Macintosh integration.

      There is no technical reason why X11 couldn't be as smoothly integrated into OS X as Carbo

      • Re:Apple's fault (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        You've got to be kidding. No one likes X. Nobody is ever going to bother developing X-based interfaces for Mac software. It isn't even simple to make existing X applications fit in, since at the very least they use different widget sets.
        • Nobody is ever going to bother developing X-based interfaces for Mac software.

          As long as the X11 server for Macintosh keeps sucking as badly as it does, indeed, nobody will bother.

          It isn't even simple to make existing X applications fit in, since at the very least they use different widget sets.

          It would be easy to make Gnome and KDE apps look and feel exactly like Macintosh apps. The only obstacle is Apple's legal department.

          OS X already ships with at least three different widget sets (Carbon, Cocoa

      • Apple's fault (for making NeoOffice/J possible) (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Kaseijin ( 766041 ) on Saturday June 25, 2005 @10:01AM (#12908713)
        That's Apple's fault: they are putting roadblocks in the way of people trying to do a better job with X11 integration on Macintosh.... There is no technical reason why X11 couldn't be as smoothly integrated into OS X as Carbon and Cocoa are....they probably are afraid that if X11 becomes well enough integrated so that people can write applications with a native L&F, it would become the predominant API on OS X.
        What you mean is that Apple isn't doing with X11 what is has with Java, which is to devote significant effort to get to the point where the simplest apps can pass for native and the rest feel like poor imitations. Unlike Java, X11 doesn't have a standard high-level graphical framework, so there's no way Apple can provide generic "X11" integration. They'd need to provide their own APIs, and toolkit developers would have to use them... oh [wxwidgets.org], wait [trolltech.com].
        The OOo developers got so annoyed with Apple's behavior that they stopped working on Macintosh integration.
        The OOo developers stopped working on Mac integration because it wasn't a priority for them, the NO/J developers were doing a better job of it, and NO/J's license precludes merging code from NO/J into OOo.
        X11 should... run automatically on every Macintosh
        This reminds me of a story [folklore.org], only in reverse. If I wanted X11 to load when I log in, I'd put it in my login items. I don't, because waiting longer for a usable desktop just to hide startup time for applications I may not even use wouldn't do me any good.
        • Unlike Java, X11 doesn't have a standard high-level graphical framework, so there's no way Apple can provide generic "X11" integration

          At the X11 layer, Apple should provide good window management, clipboard integration, keycode management, printing, and a small extension that would let X11 apps access Apple-native features through the X11 protocol. The rest (menu bars, etc.) the Gnome and KDE developers would do if Apple's legal department only would let them.

          If I wanted X11 to load when I log in, I'd

        • The OOo developers stopped working on Mac integration because it wasn't a priority for them, the NO/J developers were doing a better job of it, and NO/J's license precludes merging code from NO/J into OOo.

          That raises at least two questions for me:

          1. Is the fact that OpenOffice.org is basically run by Sun likely to be a significant factor here?
          2. How can NO/J's licence preclude merging code back into OOo, if it was based on OOo in the first place? If the NO/J devs just picked up the OOo source under the
      • Why on Earth would Apple want to make X11 standard and fully integrated on Mac OS X? Apple has their own windowing environment and it is much better, along with much more heavily developed and system-wide integrated, than X11. X11 is shit and should have been replaced decades ago. X11 is the result of typical Unix-like infighting and politics, otherwise decades of programming would have produced a windowing environment akin to or better than Aqua (and all of its related frameworks) instead of the shit th
        • I am combining X11 and all of it related window environments as the same in my comment above. Both X11 and its window environments are all garbage and should have been replaced decades ago by something much better.

  • Open Office (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Eightyford ( 893696 )
    What is the status of OO.org on the mac platform? I have heard that the interface is not consistent with other OSX applications. But other than that, what is the stability, speed and usability like? I personally very much enjoy OO.org on Windows, though excel really is the best spreadsheet software that I have yet seen on any platform.

    • Re:Open Office (Score:5, Insightful)

      by AKAImBatman ( 238306 ) * <akaimbatman@gmaYEATSil.com minus poet> on Saturday June 25, 2005 @01:19AM (#12907511) Homepage Journal
      FYI, I think the moderators marked you "flamebait" because you weren't paying attention. OOo for Mac require X11, looks like crap, acts like crap, and can't properly size a window to save its life. This spurred the invention of NeoOffice/J [planamesa.com], which is OpenOffice, but using Java to fill in a few holes (such as the GUI). It does not require X11, it's reasonably snappy, holds up quite well, and has most (all?) of the features of the latest 1.x release of OpenOffice.

      though excel really is the best spreadsheet software that I have yet seen on any platform.

      That is the oddest thing to saY. IMHO, most spreadsheets are alike and interoperate quite well. It's the word processing documents that are the killer.

      • Re:Open Office (Score:3, Insightful)

        by elbobo ( 28495 )
        It's the word processing documents that are the killer.

        Somewhat off-topic: When it comes to word processor apps, nothing I've seen or used has ever come near the vast superiority of WordPerfect (even up to or even especially the latest versions). It's a sad thing indeed to see WordPerfect die a slow death in the market.

        • When it comes to word processor apps, nothing I've seen or used has ever come near the vast superiority of WordPerfect.

          100% correct. I used it way back in the DOS days, and there's nothing more powerful than "reveal codes" to fix some nagging formatting issue. It was just so easy to delete whatever bit of junk was making the document behave badly. And as a lawyer, WP provided some really nice features. Like easily making pleading paper (numbers down the L side). OOo just doesn't do this right.

      • Re:Open Office (Score:2, Informative)

        by adepali ( 749748 )
        The moderation system is going down the drain if this post is marked as 5 Insightful... what's Insightful about it?? The fact that most spreadsheets are alike? This is true only for a novice or low demands user, at the high demands end the spreadsheet you use makes a MASSIVE difference, and excel is, indeed, one of the best available (if not the best one). For developers it's even better, try comparing the Excel type library as an activeX and the OOo UNO API.

      • You're kidding right?

        Spreadsheets are all alike?

        Excel does have features that OO still doesn't have, Kspread is coming along but has a long way to go to catch up IMO.

        I love OO, especially the 1.9 releases, but dangit I still do stuff that requires Excel and I'm not rewriting all my macros either.

        I can open spreadsheets in most any application but I loose functionality that Excel offers when I do. Thus I use Crossover + Excel for those occasions where I must have Excel.

        Documents, pfftt. Use

    • "though excel really is the best spreadsheet software that I have yet seen on any platform."

      For some uses maybe, but certainly not for all. Excel is notorious among statisticians and scientists for awful accuracy and calculation bugs that have gone unfixed for several versions (1). For statistical analysis the answers Excel give are sometimes wrong by orders of magnitude. We're talking about completely ridiculous answers rather than simply inaccurate ones.

      Plotting colourful graphs are cute enough, but get
      • It's not just the accuracy, it's the interface. Excel is really quick and easy to use, the keyboard shortcuts are a lot better than gnumeric. It makes putting in numbers and copy/pasting equations all over the place much simpler. And it looks better too. The graphs are clearly and more consistent, and they open in their own tabs rather than as a floating image over your spreadsheet.

        Not all of us use spreadsheets for important calculations, I use it as a way of organising data, the actual calculations are s
  • none of these offer complete exchange integration, so any office that runs exchange wont really benefit
    • none of these offer complete exchange integration

      FYI, Entourage (part of Office v.X) supports Exchange integration. In fact, Entourage is about the only real killer app in Office v.X when faced off with NeoOffice/J. Especially for environments where Exchange is an absolute must-have.

      Entourage would actually be one of the best email clients out there if it didn't feel so darn quirky. It constantly does weird stuff, like get the time wrong, pop up dismissed meeting notices, hang while downloading, etc. May
      • FYI, Entourage (part of Office v.X) supports Exchange integration. In fact, Entourage is about the only real killer app in Office v.X when faced off with NeoOffice/J. Especially for environments where Exchange is an absolute must-have.

        Sadly, in my experience while hooking up Outlook to Exchange is a no-brainer, Entourage can be a pain in the ass. Last I used it was about a year ago and it still was unreasonably quirky. Plus its interface seems to be unnecessarily different than Outlook.

        It's baffled m

  • Microsoft has to hate this... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Hamster Lover ( 558288 ) * on Saturday June 25, 2005 @01:44AM (#12907585) Journal
    I haven't bought the Office suite from Microsoft for close to five years now with the introduction of free alternatives like Open Office.

    What originally got me started was the inablity to open an old MS Works file in Office 2003, even with the proper conversion utilities installed. I was able to open the file in OO and make the necessary changes and save it in multiple formats for the future. I have recommended OO for precisely this problem to several friends and many have converted out of sheer spite for breaking compatibitlity between versions of Word.

    • Re:Microsoft has to hate this... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by jschoenberg ( 828313 ) on Saturday June 25, 2005 @03:11AM (#12907803)
      The word processing that was in Works is not the same as Microsoft Word. They didn't break any sort of compatibility between versions.

      Most people in this thread who want basic word processing should be comparing the various Mac word processing software to Works, not MS Word. MS Word has way more integrated enterprise and work-group features than a regular consumer will ever want to take advantage of. Most people who migrate away from Word to OO or others just want a word processor, not a collaboration tool, so they shouldn't be buying MS Office in the first place, they should buy Works, or...better yet....download Open Office or other free word processors.

      Comparing any of those basic tools to Office just doesn't make sense. Apples and oranges.
      • is that Open Office could open a legacy MS Works document that Word 2003 will the proper file conversion utilities could not. I meant to point out that I was able to steer friends to OO through the same difficulties opening some legacy Word documents in the newer versions of Office, not MS Works. In fact, I had this problem the other day. I was charged with updating a long, tedious document in our office that was originally produced in Word 97. The damn thing would not format correctly in Office 2003, so I
      • Actually Microsoft already often has broken document compatbility between versions. The classical example for this is to open a dos word document in anything newer wordish, also the breakages often happen on a minor scale, for instance word 97 docs which suddenly crash newer word versions (which often can be fixed by OO), missing layouts missing content etc... Often the breakage even occurs between the mac and windows versions on the same version level. As for the works example, this is not rally an excuse

  • TextEdit (Score:4, Interesting)

    by pbooktebo ( 699003 ) on Saturday June 25, 2005 @01:46AM (#12907589)
    Although MS Office is fine, I've gotten random crashes lately and the app is sluggish. Maybe it is related to Tiger issues. I have resolved all my font conflicts through FontBook.

    I actually have been using TextEdit for quite a lot of writing lately. Once you get the hang of the font menu (customizible though FontBook) and set your preferences, I find it to be a really comfortable solution.

    Once my drafts mature (I do a lot of rewriting), I send them over to Office (where I use EndNote), but The simplicity of TextEdit really works for me.
    • learn it, love it, live it.
      • Oh, come on... I know I shouldn't respond to trolls, but they're scarcely comparable.

        vi is excellent at what it does -- editing plain text. I use it a lot; it's great for source code, and for complex editing tasks, with powerful features that I miss everywhere else. It's also very lean and efficient, available on practically every platform, and runs fine over terminal connections.

        But it's hardly a replacement for TextEdit: it's not WYSIWYG, it has no support for fonts or other effects, it can't read

        • yes, I agree. It was just the requisite vi troll. I learned it as a young lad on a vt-52 and it has become the blade on my swiss army knife that gets used again and again. I was just thinking last night that one thing that annoys me about macs is that they are hard to operate without a mouse. It is actually pretty easy to learn how to use windows with only a keyboard.
          • True. Aqua scores very high on general consistency, intuitiveness, and predictability, but keyboard operation still needs a bit of work. Though Tiger seems to have improved things a bit; you can now tab to most controls, rather than just text fields, for example. And of course there have always been function keypresses for accessing the menu bar, dock, &c.

            I find Windows (at work) annoys me more on a day-to-day basis; I'm always getting confused trying to move the cursor to the start or end of a tex

  • another alternative (Score:3, Interesting)

    by sdedeo ( 683762 ) on Saturday June 25, 2005 @01:59AM (#12907620) Homepage Journal
    I use Mellel [redlers.com], which is not open source (I don't think), but is shareware. It is pretty sleek looking, runs fast, and I haven't had a problem with it. Customer support is great.

    It seems like the main users of Mellel are people needing multilingual support, especially for things like Hebrew (reading the other way) and Japanese, Arabic, etc. It also integrates with some of the bibliography software out there. And I'm pretty damn sure it reads in .doc files.
  • ...except, of course, for the price.

    This is where things like NeoOffice, OpenOffice, and (if you're looking at nonfree solutions) iWork come in very handy. Not everyone wants to cough up the big bucks for what to most people is a word processor that comes bundled with a spreadsheet, a presentation systyem, and an e-mail client, plus a database on Windows. Many eople (especially a significant portion of home users) just want to be able to read and write relatively simple Word and RTF documents, and if tha

  • Nothing like stating your opinion as a fact (Score:3, Insightful)

    by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Saturday June 25, 2005 @02:23AM (#12907690)
    "Most [options] seem to be open source, which is good for the programming community and better for the Apple user."

    I can more or less see the first one... but better for the Apple user how, exactly? Does it do the job the user wants better than the closed-source option? Most reasonable people would say "no" - the job, like it or not, is to work seamlessly and transparently with MS Office. At (theoretical) best it can do this job "as good as" Office, but if you've used OpenOffice on any significant MS Office document you know that isn't the case right now.

    You may feel that "open source" is a laudable goal in and of itself. I won't disagree with you, but I doubt that most users will ever really care.

    • In the realm of "as good as office"... there are plenty of small organizations, as well as individuals, that never use the "high" end functions of Office.. (more importantly, those that give the Open Source Office suites fits when trying to import the documents.) Those groups would benefit from the alternatives more than an entrenched, giant organization that relies on certain aspects of the Office format (revision histories and that sort of thing.) I think in that group, it is better. It's cheaper for on
      • The real problem isn't the lack of support of obscure features, it's the lack of true file compatibilty.

        As we learned in the early days of PC clones, 99% compatibility isn't really much better than 0% compatibility.

        Compatiblity is a losing strategy for competing with MS Office anyway. You need to make a product so much better that people will drop Office to use it.
        • I think that compatibility is a losing strategy for anyone competing in the same arena (price for price) as Office. However, since this is free software, open source projects like OpenOffice don't have to worry about luring customers within a certain time frame. (before the funding runs out, or something like that.)

          Maybe that can be the advantage another non-free suite would not have in the market. With MS going to XML document formats, perhaps compatibility can become more reliable and less like the he

  • nothing really yet (Score:3, Interesting)

    by b17bmbr ( 608864 ) on Saturday June 25, 2005 @02:45AM (#12907739)
    OO.org is quite a bit better on PC (linux, windows) than macs. for whtaever reasons, it just is. there are alot of decent options, like abiword/gnumeric or KOffice (if you can like X11 and fink...) but in the whole industry there's just not much of a market for office suites. it's office or office. usually 97 versus 2000 versus XP. hopefully OO.org 2.0 will do for it what moz has done for the browser wars.

    i installed office X on my ibook because I had to for grad school. damn profs always wanting .doc's. anyways, i rarely use it in my classroom. honestly. i use keynote and abiword, as my WP needs are small. also, for alot of things I just go the html route. but that's me. anyways, office is by far the best bet on the mac. since OO.org has kinda dropped OSX from its priority OS's, don't expect much improvement in the mac situation. apple could, i imagine, have put money into OO.org, or some other suite, or developed one in house, but they really need a top tier MSOFfice, and pissing off ms ain't gonna be helpful. really, apple sales are probably 1% of microsoft's business. it isn't gonna cause billy g to lose sleep the way linux does.

    apple needs office more than MS needs apple.
  • Although it's great to have a number of office applications, Microsoft Office is still the de facto standard whether some of us like it or not.

    A lot of these Office clones seem to be fairly limited in function as compared to MS Office. For example, Apple Keynote still tends to loose a lot of formatting when importing PowerPoint documents. From Office 2004 to 2003 (on PC), however, I have yet to encounter any such problems. In the professional world, this is a fact of life everyday, and taking the risk o
    • If I was still a student - yes - free is MUCH better than $100. Let's see - no income, having to live off savings and possibly temporary jobs during the vacation and still sinking into debt - that $100 is needed for food and beer, thanks.

  • Without NeoOffice/J, no iBook (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Nice2Cats ( 557310 ) on Saturday June 25, 2005 @03:48AM (#12907885)
    NeoOffice/J was the critical ingredient that let me choose an iBook over a ThinkPad that I would have installed Linux on: There was no way in hell I had $400 for Microsoft Office, and OpenOffice.org on the Mac sucks so bad that you might as well use AppleWorks. Well, maybe not that bad, but it is basically unusable.

    I have said this before and I will keep saying it: Apple's greatest problem at the moment is the lack of an affordable full office suite ($400 is not affordable -- note you can almost buy a Mac Mini for that). People won't accept something as radically different as Pages. NeoOffice/J is the best hope they have. I can understand that Apple doesn't want to come out publicly in support of the project, because Microsoft could cut them off at the knees, and Apple is dependent on MS Office. But I hope to hell that Jobs has some people squirreled away in Infinity Drive somewhere working on this.

    Office suites are big, complicated pieces of software, sort of like operating systems and browsers. Apple should do what they did with OS X (BSD/Darwin) and Safarai (Konqueror, KHTML) and use NeoOffice/J as the basis for their own suite. This Pages stuff can only be a stop-gap measure.

    • Actually, the thing that keeps me from using NeoOffice/J is that it tries so much to be like Office that it ends up not really being any better. Sure, it may have minor technical superiorities, but sometimes to be better you have to be radically different.

      For most basic editing I am now using Nisus Writer Express. It's a great little piece of software. I don't do mail merges every day. I mostly just write, so it works just fine for me.

  • Sorry, no can do. (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Pliep ( 880962 )
    No flame intended, but I think NeoOffice/J is utter crap. Functionality is great (if one thinks duplicating MS features and functionalities is the way to go; personally I am horrified to find the preferences in the "tools" menu, amongst 100 other usability flaws) but the user interface just is an exact copy of the Windows 95 UI. My eyes hurt when using NeoOffice/J. This just does not give me the user experience I expect as a Mac user. This combines a Windows UI with Windows usabilty. I'm not a Windows user
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • I use ThinkFree (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Ilgaz ( 86384 ) on Saturday June 25, 2005 @06:18AM (#12908166) Homepage
    I bought it in my windows days when Sun Java for Win32 started to rock, now on OS X, I still use it and thanks to java maybe, its one of the rare programs did not need a update etc to run on tiger.

    It plain works.

    Version 3 comes in weeks, http://www.thinkfree.com/ [thinkfree.com]

    It passed very evil tests here, like editing a very bad formatted pro movie script. When I saw the 450 kb .doc file, I knew what was coming but thank god it worked.

    Another problem with them would be? er, whitelist thinkfree if you buy/trial it. They are now Korean company ;) You know what I mean. Besides jokes, they now have a huge Korean company at their back, Haansoft. I wish they try "webtop" type office again some day.

    First days of Thinkfree, you could run it from IE, using JVM 1.1. No wonder we must be impressed.

  • Unlike some open-source office suites, NeoOffice/J users can drag and drop as well as copy and paste data to and from other applications.

    Hmmm ... what other "open-source" "office suites" are available for OSX ?
    • It has it's own usability issues, but there is an AbiWord version or OSX. Load up time is very fast (as in 4.5x faster on an ancient iBook) -- their manner of handling the toolbar completely blows however and ruins the whole thing (it's in a separate floating toolbar -- leads to not having the tools immediately available in the document you are working on).

  • What about AbiWord? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by OrangeHairMan ( 560161 ) on Saturday June 25, 2005 @09:08AM (#12908533)
    http://www.abisource.com/ [abisource.com]

    Completely free and open, and using native widgets and updated constantly. Granted, it's only a word processor, but that's all I've noticed being talked about in this /. discussion anyway. If you're going to do serious spreadsheet work, for example. you *will* need Excel -- it's actually really not that bad.

    -o
    • It's a fast loader and looks nice -- except what in the world caused them to make the toolbar a floating easily lost and hidden separate window? It really ruins the whole experience when you have to hunt for the toolbar among all the open windows. The toolbar should be placed inside the edit window, not outside it like gimp.
  • This week I tried a test with OO.o (1.1.2) and Neo (1.1 release candidate, patch 8), opening a document created with MS Word 2004 for Mac (version 11.1).

    I think these are the latest versions of OO.o and Neo for macintosh.

    My test was simple. The document has no tables. It has only one font family, Times New Roman (at 11 point normal, at 12 point normal, italic, and bold, and 14 point bold). No text is in colour. There are 3 inset figures. The document is 10 pages long. I cannot supply it the docu

  • I fucking hate Slashdot these days. Did NONE of you read the article? NeoOffice/J is NOT our only hope! [Yoda]There is another.[/Yoda]

    The end of the article talks about a "ThinkFree Office" that is also due out this summer, however, I don't see one single post in this thread talking about it. It's a non-free product, but why should that mean it gets any less coverage here? Every single post I've seen here defending NeoOffice/J against MS Office says something to the effect of, "it's good enough for me
    • I don't see one single post in this thread talking about it. It's a non-free product, but why should that mean it gets any less coverage here?

      5 posts above yours. 4 hours and one minute prior to your post. Modded up, even.

      And I didn't even try.

  • I have both, but... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by chadseld ( 761331 )
    At my work we have a site license for Office.X so I've been able to compare Office and Neo side by side without $$ being part of the equation. My use of both consists or writing technical software manuals. These documents require the use of Table Of Contents, Index, Cross-references, screen shots with captions, and are generally in the ball park of 100 pages long. Office.X simply isn't up to the task. Maybe the PC version of Office is better, it has to be or no one would use it. Office simply can not remem
  • Other than price, I don't understand why anybody would NOT want to use Office for OS X. The OS X Office team is completely different than the Windows Office team. Anybody who has even taken a few minutes with Office on the Mac can realize it's the best office suite for any platform, period. It's got the performane and an oustanding UI to match. Not only does it beat the pants off of any open source contenders right now, but it also kicks Office for Windows butt too. It's an oustanding product all aroun
  • I have said it over and over again at various discussion about MS Office vs alternatives - for scientists, compatibility between MS Word and Endnote (a dominant citation reference manager) is the single most important reasons to stick with MS. Give me OO, Pages or any other app with built-in capabilities of Endnote, I'd drop MS Office on the spot.

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