Slashdot Mirror

I would posit the latter. Look at some of the ODBC problems in M$ products for Apple. The problems have been around for ages and M$ has no plans to fix them, and hasn't fixed them despite new releases. The solution promoted is to ditch Apple. That company doesn't appear to treat Windows users any better, so my solution, however, was to ditch M$ and that has worked quite well.

Yes, the M$ Office for Apple has been profitable, but another reason for M$ to keep it around would be to maintain the lock on the office file formats. So to drop it now is probably just trying to force the few into Windows and thus the InfoPath / MS OOXML lock-in. IMHO, it's a premature move and will cost them.

There are a quite a few options, that are in most ways better, though different. The weakest points, which could go away in short order, are the file formats. The M$ formats are still undocumented and only some on the list below fully support OpenDocument, though that number is rapidly growing.

• Neooffice
• Mariner Write, Mariner Calc
• Abiword
• NisusWriter
• ThinkFree
• Mellel
• OpenOffice.org (still needs X11, I'm fine with that myself since I use X11 anyway, but others may not be)
• iWork (includes Keynote)

That's just focusing on word processors. There is a similar range of choice for spreadsheets and presentation graphics. Now see how important control of those file formats is.

I would posit the latter. Look at some of the ODBC problems in M$ products for Apple. The problems have been around for ages and M$ has no plans to fix them, and hasn't fixed them despite new releases. The solution promoted is to ditch Apple. That company doesn't appear to treat Windows users any better, so my solution, however, was to ditch M$ and that has worked quite well.

Yes, the M$ Office for Apple has been profitable, but another reason for M$ to keep it around would be to maintain the lock on the office file formats. So to drop it now is probably just trying to force the few into Windows and thus the InfoPath / MS OOXML lock-in. IMHO, it's a premature move and will cost them.

There are a quite a few options, that are in most ways better, though different. The weakest points, which could go away in short order, are the file formats. The M$ formats are still undocumented and only some on the list below fully support OpenDocument, though that number is rapidly growing.

• Neooffice
• Mariner Write, Mariner Calc
• Abiword
• NisusWriter
• ThinkFree
• Mellel
• OpenOffice.org (still needs X11, I'm fine with that myself since I use X11 anyway, but others may not be)
• iWork (includes Keynote)

That's just focusing on word processors. There is a similar range of choice for spreadsheets and presentation graphics. Now see how important control of those file formats is.

http://www.marinersoftware.com/sitepage.php?page=8 5

Mac Journal seems to be the closest thing I've ever seen.

ThinkFree Office is Java-based, but it runs a heck of a lot better than either OpenOffice.org or NeoOffice/J and it's only $50. They've done a killer job adapting a Java app to look and feel native on OS X, and you don't notice the slowdown.

Mariner sells a good word-processor and spreadsheet combo as well... I don't remember the price, but I want to say $120 for word-processor and spreadsheet packaged together.

http://www.thinkfree.com/
http://www.marinersoftware.com/

I ended up buying ThinkFree because 1) I'm cheap, and 2) it's good enough. From the trials of both I'd say that Mariner is better.

Okay, let's see...

There's AbiWord. I wasn't real impressed, but you could try that out. Also check out Mariner Write, Z-Write, and, of course, NisusWriter. You might also check out ThinkFree Office.

Try checking out the Macintosh Products Guide for more information.

Mellel is good. Other interesting office-alternatives are Mariner Write and Mariner Calc, by Mariner .

Both are very bloated. Truth be told, most software nowadays is much bigger than whatever was their equivalent back in the 1990s. That's why I like Write and Calc, by Mariner Software for Macintosh.

They are fast, lean, powerful, ellegant, and really damn rock-solid alternatives to those, uh, slightly overweight programs of debatable reliability. And much cheaper than Microsoft's stuff too. Not as cheap as OpenOffice, sure, but this much quality deserves a reward. So, say to to bloatware, try Mariner's stuff! But first, compare these:

Microsoft:
Word 2004 .... $ 229
PPoint 2004 .... $ 229
Office 2004 .... $ 399

Mariner:
Write .... $ 59.95
Calc .... 59.95
MarinerPak (Write + Calc) .... $ 89.95

Mariner Calc is a pretty good native spreadsheet app. It even opens Excel files to ease the transition. Costs 50 bucks.

Actually this is not so big a deal - it didn't work natively under Aqua/Quartz, so we haven't lost out on much.

That being said, there are existing commercial non-Microsoft solutions. Mariner Software has decent word processor and spreadsheet software available for a reasonable price. Redlers has a nice little word processor for a shareware price.

The thing is, Mac users have (or used to have) a tendency to monitor what's available for their platform. It comes from being treated like the bastard stepchild of the neighboring axe-murderer by the rest of the computer community.

I'm not sure that I can consider the MacOSX port of OpenOffice as "usable" until it has the capacity to -print-

Then rejoice, for OOO under X11 can indeed print. I think there may be some inkjets that have driver issues (Epson?) but I've used it to print very nicely to two Postscript laser printers (HP4000, Brother HL1470N) and even to PDF.

If you're complaining about the NeoOffice "Flaming Yeti" build, then yes. This is an in-progress Cocoa port. The X11 build has been the focus so far. Now they should make faster progress on the Cocoa one.

But the main juice of OOO is working all right: MS translation. I've found Word 5 documents arrive DOA, but Word >97 docs read in okay. There are formatting glitches here and there, though. Your mileage may vary.

If you just want a kick-butt Cocoa wordprocessor, maybe consider Nisus Express or Mariner Write. They both try to do Word decoding, but in my experience the translation is inferior to OOO.

ps. The OOO work would go faster if Apple pulled a Safari and built a monster WP on top of the OOO translation libraries, and contributed fixes back. He said wishfully.

Mariner Software released DropDoc, which is based on the GPL'ed wvWare libraries. It converts Word documents to .rtf, which maintains most of the basic formatting of a Word document.

I have used it and it works fairly well.