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NeoOffice why?
- Thread starter zepharus
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full compatibility?
advanced features.
not everything works for everyone. use what works for you. Options are a good thing
advanced features.
not everything works for everyone. use what works for you. Options are a good thing
The work that I receive demands that I have Visual Basic support in Word. So for now the only option for the foreseeable future is MS Office 2004 - MS Office 2008 is removing this feature and OpenOffice/NeoOffice still doesn't include this. Another fact is that Office opens faster and is quicker to use.
I would agree that compatabilty is important. I recently bought a MBP 2.2 (love it!) and have Neo Office loaded on it. I work full time and are a full time student as well. I found out recently that you can view MS document once tranferred to Neo Office but it doesn't work both ways. I wrote out my homework using the Neo Writer (.odt) and then transferred the file to my PC at work to complete it and MS Word 2003 wont open it. Even changing the file name to .doc didnt make a difference. I activated the MS Word "test drive" and may consider just rolling with that.
Before the latest iWork, I had bought iWork '05, and really only used it for Pages as 'desktop publishing', since MS doesn't make Publisher for Mac, and Pagemaker is a bit too much for my needs.
I basically never need to do presentations, so Keynote and PowerPoint go completely unused.
I have a lot of old Excel spreadsheets that only open properly in Excel. O
and Numbers both have issues. (Although new spreadsheets I have created in O and they open fine in Numbers.)
I basically never need to do presentations, so Keynote and PowerPoint go completely unused.
I have a lot of old Excel spreadsheets that only open properly in Excel. O
and Numbers both have issues. (Although new spreadsheets I have created in O and they open fine in Numbers.)
NeoOffice is okay but I think it suffers a bit trying to be an MS Office clone, along with OpenOffice.
I don't see any reason to buy MS Office unless you absolutely have to have 98 % compatibility because of business. I even used ThinkFree Office for a while and it worked.
I did notice that OpenOffice on Ubuntu Linux for x86 works pretty well so hopefully, the native port of Open Office to Mac OS X will be better.
I don't see any reason to buy MS Office unless you absolutely have to have 98 % compatibility because of business. I even used ThinkFree Office for a while and it worked.
I did notice that OpenOffice on Ubuntu Linux for x86 works pretty well so hopefully, the native port of Open Office to Mac OS X will be better.
I like OO, and have used it since Staroffice 5.2 in Linux and MS. But I baulked at the downloading stage for my '07 iMac.
Which version do I want? aqua or X11??
How different is NeoOffice? I don't want to bloat with every type of office software going, I just need casual cross-office functionality.
Which version do I want? aqua or X11??
How different is NeoOffice? I don't want to bloat with every type of office software going, I just need casual cross-office functionality.
NeoOffice is the best "OS X-native" version of OpenOffice, for the moment. While the official OpenOffice.org release is, technically, OS X native, NeoOffice has better integration. If you really want to try the "official" OpenOffice.org release, then you want Aqua. If you don't know what X11 means, then you can't even use it. (Aqua is the OS X "windowing system", while X11 is the UNIX windowing system. X11 isn't even installed on OS X by default, but you can choose to add it and run X11-based UNIX apps. Including their usually horrendous interfaces.)
As for bloat, running OpenOffice carries with it the 'bloat' of running X11, although X11 isn't too bad. NeoOffice has a slower-to-respond interface than OpenOffice on older hardware, but anything faster than 1 GHz should be fast enough to be barely noticeable. Neither one is a memory hog, but they ARE "full featured" office suites, so they aren't LIGHT on memory usage, either.
As for bloat, running OpenOffice carries with it the 'bloat' of running X11, although X11 isn't too bad. NeoOffice has a slower-to-respond interface than OpenOffice on older hardware, but anything faster than 1 GHz should be fast enough to be barely noticeable. Neither one is a memory hog, but they ARE "full featured" office suites, so they aren't LIGHT on memory usage, either.
Thanks, I am familiar with X11 thru linux and FreeBSD, and because of that I wasn't sure what the relevance of aqua was, I thought X11 would be the native for mac - that's how much attention I was paying mac until ~6months ago!
I'll try neo then.
Interesting thread. Since I have VM Ware and Office 2007 for Windows (left overs from a consulting gig) I don't even have an office suite on my OS X isntall (except iWork 08 which I love).
For most daily word processing stuff I use Bean - http://www.bean-osx.com/Bean.html - very small, very light, very nifty and widely compatable piece of software and if I need more advanced stuff I just use Word 07 in XP.
I am looking forward to OO's native client coming around at some-point as NeoOffice doesn't currently have the database application - so until then, I still use Access....
For most daily word processing stuff I use Bean - http://www.bean-osx.com/Bean.html - very small, very light, very nifty and widely compatable piece of software and if I need more advanced stuff I just use Word 07 in XP.
I am looking forward to OO's native client coming around at some-point as NeoOffice doesn't currently have the database application - so until then, I still use Access....
heh. Yeah, the X11 version appears exactly the same on OS X as OpenOffice.org does on Windows or a UNIX. i.e. No nice OS X-look to it.