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Alternatives To Office For Mac OS X

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."

232 comments

  1. Apple Office by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Now, why exactly has apple not came out with their version of office yet? Does apple not want to appeal to the office... or just to the home users with video, pictures and music?

    1. Re:Apple Office by AKAImBatman · · Score: 0

      Now, why exactly has apple not came out with their version of office yet

      Apple distributes (or at least used to distribute) AppleWorks with every copy of OS X. However, it's not really that great of an Office Suite, so most users tend to forget it exists. I don't even remember if I still have my copy on disk anymore. It's certainly not still on the Dock.

    2. Re:Apple Office by LochNess · · Score: 4, Informative

      Actually, AppleWorks doesn't come with every copy of OS X. It comes pre-installed on the "consumer" Macs (iBook, iMac, eMac), but not generally on the PowerBooks and PowerMacs.

    3. Re:Apple Office by hunterx11 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      If Apple did this, there is a chance that Microsoft would stop making MS Office for OS X, and for many users this would make OS X no longer an option.

      --
      English is easier said than done.
    4. Re:Apple Office by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Right. AppleWorks does not come with OS X. PowerMacs and PowerBooks come with NO office suite installed, but they do get the trial version of MS Office 2k4.

      OTOH, OS X Tiger now ships with a 30-day iWorks trial disk. But not AppleWorks. Never did. Two totally separate things. Just like OS X and iLife are totally separate, even though some people think OS X used to come with iLife. Nope, never did. COMPUTERS come with the programs, but buying the OS off the shelf gets you the OS and nothing else.

  2. NeoOffice/J by LochNess · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:NeoOffice/J by Soko · · Score: 3, Informative

      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

      --
      "Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
    2. Re:NeoOffice/J by 2muchcoffeeman · · Score: 1

      The only downside to NeoOffice/J is that it takes f--o--r--e--v--e--r to load when you first start the application.

      --
      Prevent Windows piracy. Use Linux instead.
    3. Re:NeoOffice/J by gardyloo · · Score: 1

      Huh. That's the Barnyard(TM) release, right?

    4. Re:NeoOffice/J by fm6 · · Score: 2, Insightful
      ...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, you have to use Office yourself, period.

    5. Re:NeoOffice/J by MikeFM · · Score: 1

      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.

      --
      At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
    6. Re:NeoOffice/J by binford2k · · Score: 3, Informative
      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.

      Sorry, that's absolutely not right. I've run nothing but OpenOffice for about 2-3 years now and have yet to have any of the problems you describe. However, those kinds of things happen to my colleagues running Word quite often.
    7. Re:NeoOffice/J by billDCat · · Score: 1

      Funny, Office itself doesn't always open it's own files properly, and crashes on a regular basis for many of my co-workers when opening or printing many files. Try distributing complex documents with many tables and figures, and add revision tracking on top of that. Oi vey!

    8. Re:NeoOffice/J by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      i must agree that fm6 attitude is load of BS.
      as billDCat mentioned, M$O can not open it's own files! :)
      It's time to drop this load of garbage and move on.
      For GNU Linux/KDE users you have KOffice and OO and also Abiword (Gnome? have not used it for 3y or sorry...)

      and also see
      KOffice 1.4 Released

    9. Re:NeoOffice/J by bnenning · · Score: 2, Informative

      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.

      --
      How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
    10. Re:NeoOffice/J by Artemis3 · · Score: 1

      OpenOffice2 seems to open files with passwords...

      --
      Artix
      Your Linux, your init.
    11. Re:NeoOffice/J by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      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."

      When I should read "Sorry - I'm a moron developer that has 1/2 implimented something that I'm telling everyone is fully implimented...

    12. Re:NeoOffice/J by Bert64 · · Score: 2, Informative

      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 :)

      --
      http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
    13. Re:NeoOffice/J by legirons · · Score: 1

      "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 screen resolution to you), and in every country (hey, our printer uses A4 yours uses letter)

      Even basic things like styles can't be accurate in .DOC -- I've been editing just simple word documents at work, and when you change a word to bold, it suddenly decides to rename the style you're using, update the new style with the bold information, and modify a load of unrelated text. In a randomly changing environment like that, you can't expect accuracy or consistancy from anything.

      Personally, I find word processors to be only slightly more useful than plain-text, and a lot more annoying. You can't even accurately cut and paste one part of a document to another before Word decides that it's going to be clever with the stylesheet, and your Title1 becomes just another ListBullet3 because it was too close to the chaos of a Word-special paste operation.

      The only good format I can think of offhand for multi-author collaboration of documents with formatting, images, tables, etc is HTML, or perhaps MediaWiki. I've used .DOC enough to know that having more than one person working on a document tends to leave it in an awful state.

      Obviously PDF is the gold standard for anything you want to convert accurately between computers, but it's not an editable format. Are there any other word-processor formats which make an attempt to store font information, screen-resolution, etc.?

    14. Re:NeoOffice/J by sambira · · Score: 1

      > If you mod something 'funny', make sure it really is 'funny'

      This means I have to go out and get a "test audience". That just can't happen on my salary.

    15. Re:NeoOffice/J by eclectic4 · · Score: 1

      ...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.

      --

      "The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel Boorstin
    16. Re:NeoOffice/J by junkgui · · Score: 1

      I like OOo... but this just isn't true. Have you actually moved the file back and forth between Word? Even RTF files get screwed up on the round trip... Have you ever tryed to use an excel based Expense report template, the kind that a lot of businesses use with scripts and such, they get really messed up... Either you are lieing or you know something I dont.

    17. Re:NeoOffice/J by fm6 · · Score: 1
      Sure, Office is a buggy piece of crap with version compatibility issues. Doesn't change anything I said.

      It's a very bad thing that so many people are forced to use such lousy software. Doesn't change the factors that force them to use it.

    18. Re:NeoOffice/J by fm6 · · Score: 1

      Sure, it'd be nice to re-educate every word processor user on the planet to do things completely differently. As long as you're counting on miracles, let's wish away terrorism, poverty, disease, and Rick Bermann!

    19. Re:NeoOffice/J by MikeFM · · Score: 1

      Cool - I did not know I could do that. I'll look into it. Installers are stupid. Linux does perfectly well without them and a lot of OS X app I've tried work perfectly well without them. I don't understand the need to make things so complex. :)

      --
      At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
    20. Re:NeoOffice/J by fm6 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.

  3. Um by mcc · · Score: 5, Informative
    1. Re:Um by peetola · · Score: 1

      has anyone had good success with Pages, or the iWork suite for that matter? I have been reluctant to give it a try for the lack of a spreadsheet program, but the rumor mills say that's coming soon.

    2. Re:Um by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's still not a product geared for the office professional. They are appealing to the home user still/a.

    3. Re:Um by dhasenan · · Score: 1

      Because there are a lot more home users than offices, I suppose. Plus the lack of spreadsheet applications hurts office sales significantly.

    4. Re:Um by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      No, it's because Apple needs Microsoft a lot more than Microsoft needs Apple.

    5. Re:Um by Senjutsu · · Score: 4, Informative

      I like pages a lot, but don't go into it expecting anything like your standard Office-esque word processor, because that isn't what it's intended to be. It's essentially a combination simple word processor and page layout program, and using it is much more akin to a sort of visual version of the experience of writing your document in LaTeX.

    6. Re:Um by jschoenberg · · Score: 1

      More home users of computers in general? That doesn't sound correct to me.

      Or do you mean more Mac users at home than in corporations?

      I'm pretty sure there are more corporate PCs in the US than consumer's home PCs.

      Anyone have any data?

  4. Both options are great by AKAImBatman · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:Both options are great by corporatemutantninja · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

      --
      Actually, I was trying to be Insightful, not Funny.
    2. Re:Both options are great by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      If your CPU usage metric is temperature, you seriously need to sell that power book and buy a speak and spell.

    3. Re:Both options are great by wwwillem · · Score: 1
      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.....

      --
      Browsers shouldn't have a back button!! It's all about going forward...
    4. Re:Both options are great by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      I also found that my 12" PowerBook seemed to be paging the hard drive more with Tiger, so I maxed-out the RAM on it (1.12GB) and it's now much better.

      Watch the RAM in Activity Monitor. If it looks like all of your RAM is being used, I'd suggest getting more before you have to replace your hard drive because it burned out.

    5. Re:Both options are great by elbobo · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

    6. Re:Both options are great by Bert64 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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..

      --
      http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
    7. Re:Both options are great by TummyX · · Score: 1

      What the hell kind of OS crashes because of applications? I'm pretty sure OSX has memory and resource protection...

    8. Re:Both options are great by jkabbe · · Score: 2, Informative

      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.

    9. Re:Both options are great by jkabbe · · Score: 1

      Oh, I forgot to mention word count - you should turn off automatic word count too I believe.

    10. Re:Both options are great by 64nDh1 · · Score: 3, Informative
      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 installed Tiger, then when the Firewire Import existing data option came up, I pointed it to the existing Tiger installation on the other hard drive. It ported across all my apps, documents, etcetera, all unscathed give or take a few programs looking for the serial numbers again. No re-installations except maybe Norton.

      Then, due to fears of fragmentation happening again, I made a partition scheme with disk space divided by content type, so I replaced my Documents folder with an alias pointing to the /Volumes/Documents drive, and for Movies, Music and Pictures.

      Now Activity Monitor shows proc usage dropping to a steady 5-10% (in as much as you can tell from the bars on screen).

      Really hope that is of some assistance, I know others who had to clean re-install Tiger, but the benefits were worth it.

    11. Re:Both options are great by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The parent poster is right... The office v.X applications (Word and Powerpoint in particular) seem to be buggy in terms of processor cycles consumed. I noticed the same fan-blasting power jumps when I was idle and now regularly run the activity monitor chart on the dock. All of the Office aps have a tendency to jump from 3% of processor to consuming all available cycles for no reason whatsoever (often when there's no document open in the app). It's really irritating because otherwise I'd just leave them open all the time, whereas now I have to only open them when necessary (and they take forever to open because of all of the fonts I've got).

    12. Re:Both options are great by 64nDh1 · · Score: 1
      Been there, done that. Fonts damn near killed my system. There is a general use half assed cure though, a third party app which will handle font usage.

      There are a few:
      Font Agent Pro
      Font Finagler (a cache manager)
      And others

      I hit just shy of 6,000 fonts, and my system was heading for the wall before I started with Font Agent. It takes all fonts, gives you a preview of your typefaces, then you can opt to turn them off, so that Font Book isn't working with so much baggage for general tasks. It isn't quite like uninstalling fonts, they auto-activate as required. But it's a makeshift solution to getting a slightly improved functionality on a Mac with a lot of fonts.

      I have got rid of all except the basic fonts I need after filenames and other things left my browser looking like something in Klingon, so I don't screw with them anymore.

      However, I shouldn't offer false hope. Microsoft Word has it's own software to scan your font library, so even if the fonts are deactivated, Word will still throw a tantrum for whatever reason, and take hours to load on first instance with huge numbers of fonts. Sorry.

    13. Re:Both options are great by macshome · · Score: 1

      v.X is pretty shoddy. 2004, while not perfect, is much better.

    14. Re:Both options are great by spinozanyc · · Score: 1

      If your Powerbook is running slower or hotter than usual, you may want to check to make sure your lower memory slot has not failed on your Powerbook. Use system profiler.

    15. Re:Both options are great by Sir+Holo · · Score: 1

      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.
      Yup. Open up the Activity Monitor/Process Viewer and you'll see that Word X is sucking up 10-25% of your processor cycles on a 1 GHz laptop. Even if when it's in the background. You'll never see another app so egregious.
    16. Re:Both options are great by Sir+Holo · · Score: 1

      I response to other posts, this is with auto-grammar and auto-spelling turned OFF, and a document open. Even for a blank document, it hovers around 8 % CPU usage.

    17. Re:Both options are great by Bert64 · · Score: 1

      Indeed, but that protection can be circumvented by anything running as root, and msoffice used the sudo implementation to install, so it seems to have installed something nasty deep into the system..

      --
      http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
    18. Re:Both options are great by zo219 · · Score: 1

      Not happening here, on a 15" GB and 17" 1.33, Entourage running on both. So I encourage you to keep "cleaning it up." Maybe my regular use of Applejack is key? Don't really know. (Can't speak to rest of Office suite, I'm finishing my book on Pages.)

  5. Apple extending iWork? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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/

    1. Re:Apple extending iWork? by legirons · · Score: 1

      " 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 StarOffice, albeit without the spreadsheet)

  6. Why does Apple need office, anyways? by ChllaPk · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:Why does Apple need office, anyways? by Graymalkin · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

      --
      I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
    2. Re:Why does Apple need office, anyways? by porcupine8 · · Score: 1
      I'm sorry, but Appleworks sucks. The spreadsheet doesn't even support multiple sheets in a workbook, and it does some ridiculous things when you try and insert new rows into something. I use Appleworks a lot (b/c my Office runs in Classic so I only fire it up if I really need it), but I don't like it. And getting it to export to Word accurately? Just not happening. Even importing from Word is a nightmare if there are tables involved. I also have a strange problem (which might partially be my printer) where if I open a .doc file in Appleworks it will only print one page at a time. I've tried to use the presentation maker once or twice, but never got very far.

      Overall, I can't wait to d/l NeoOffice and give it a shot.

      --
      Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
  7. Apple Office exists. by dhasenan · · Score: 1
    Currently, iWork consists of Pages (a word processor) and Keynote (a presentation application, similar to MS Powerpoint). Slashdot mentioned the possibility of iWork Numbers as a spreadsheet (or possibly database) application.

    Now, if only someone would offer an alternative to MS Publisher, aside from Quark Xpress, which currently costs well over $1k.

    1. Re:Apple Office exists. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Now, if only someone would offer an alternative to MS Publisher, aside from Quark Xpress, which currently costs well over $1k.

      Ummm, ever hear of a little company called Adobe? And a little product they make called InDesign? Idoit.

    2. Re:Apple Office exists. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Have you used Pages?

      It's much more like Publisher than Word...

    3. Re:Apple Office exists. by vonFinkelstien · · Score: 2, Informative
      Scribus is a killer layout program for Linux. It is slowly coming to Mac OS X (last time I checked the Native -- i.e., no X11 -- version was in Alpha).

      Currently I use LaTeX for documents and Lilypond for music.

    4. Re:Apple Office exists. by Ixokai · · Score: 1

      Well, Pages is more like Publisher then it is Word. Its not just a word processor at all: its a user friendly, easy, "less intense" page layout application, really.

    5. Re:Apple Office exists. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Spreadsheet to complement iWork: http://www.gigawiz.com/Aabel.html

      Also, Pages (the iWork wordprocessor) by design is a simplified layout (quark/indesign) AND wordprocessing (MS Word "write letterz n shit, yo!"). Pages actually encourages "wordprocessing", like LaTeX or almost exactly like HTML, rather than just "random styling" via its Styles Drawer; instead of mucking about with typeface/font, sizes, bold, underline, etc. you simply select "title" or "body text" or "heading" which encourages *consistency*.

    6. Re:Apple Office exists. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Try Adobe Indesign. It's $1000 for the bundle w/ Photoshop, Illustraitor, and Acrobat. Considering you'd probably be dropping $700 for Photoshop anyway if you're doing page design you should check it out.

  8. OO.org Vs Neo by siplus · · Score: 3, Insightful
    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)

  9. OT: Bad link by Hugh+Lilly · · Score: 1

    That link needs to have the / removed from the end. Why does this keep happening? Is it something to do with ./ or is it some way that users are posting URLs into comments?? Working link.

  10. Open Office by Eightyford · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Open Office by Eightyford · · Score: 1

      Grow up people. Flamebait?

    2. Re:Open Office by AKAImBatman · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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, 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.

    3. Re:Open Office by jschoenberg · · Score: 1

      Excel has some amazing features that blow away any other spreadsheet software. Of course, these same features are taken advantage of by hackers :(

    4. Re:Open Office by elbobo · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.

    5. Re:Open Office by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      If you use spreadsheets to keep a list of what to buy people for Christmas, or make to make printouts of grid-lines it's understandable that you might mistake Excel for any other spreadsheet. This seems to have been the mistake that resulted in kSpread for example.

      But there are lots of people using spreadsheets for real work, people who care about efficient recalculation engines, conditional formatting, a broad range of charts, accurate financial functions etc. For them 99% of the spreadsheets out there won't cut it. They're the ones OpenOffice.org and Gnumeric have to convince and they're the ones for whom OASIS "standards" are a joke. The underpinning of the OASIS spreadsheet format is the assumption that the document format is independent of the calculation engine. Anyone who actually knew anything about Excel's guts would understand immediately that this isn't true for the world's #1 spreadsheet which makes it a pretty stupid assumption...

      It's true that a convincing clone of Word is a tough problem because people expect the same formatting, however that's frankly just as much a problem for Office on OS X as it is for OpenOffice.org or any other product. It's a tribute to Microsoft's Mac Business Unit that they're able to make this work as well as it does.

      Example: Windows and Mac users have traditionally each had a proprietary localised character set, and a font system which emphasises glyphs over character points. The result is that Word documents (and actually the same is true for the rest of MS Office, but it's rarely so important) are actually lists of glyphs, not characters. So if you're trying to read a WinWord document using a Mac, you need a translation table that knows "Oh, in this document character 146 is a bullet point" and can translate that to a similar looking character on your machine.

    6. Re:Open Office by GauteL · · Score: 1

      "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 getting the numbers right should be the first priority of any spreadsheet.

      Gnumeric on the other hand has deservedly (2) developed a very good reputation for accuracy over the last years.

      1. http://data.fas.harvard.edu/numerical_stability/g3 009.pdf
      2. http://www.lfp.uba.ar/moreno/TErrores2004/MSExcel/ statproc.pdf

      I quote from 2:
      "(...) persons who wish to use Excel for statistical purposes should exercise extreme caution.
      We note that persons who use the spreadsheet Gnumeric need not exercise such
      caution.
      "

      And:
      "One could argue that it is acceptable to use Excel for summary statistics, one-way ANOVA, linear regression, and some of the statistical distributions, but we are extremely
      concerned about Microsoft's cavalier attitude toward accuracy."

      About Gnumeric:
      "It is interesting to observe that the open source Excel-clone called "Gnumeric" was such a good clone that it even had errors
      similar to Excel. However, the developers of Gnumeric, who are part-time volunteers with no R&D budget, chose to deal with these errors in a different way: by implementing correct
      fixes. See McCullough (2004a) for a discussion."

    7. Re:Open Office by drsquare · · Score: 1

      And why does X11 on OS X work like crap? Because Apple has no interest in fixing it:

      Why would they? They already have a great, consistent, good-looking GUI, no point clogging it up with the trainwreck that is the X Window System. I can't think of anything more inefficient and pointless than running a GUI on top of another GUI. Programs should use the native GUI, there's no reason not to other than laziness and arrogance. And who wants to run a server just to get an office program working? X11 should have been put to sleep a long time ago.

    8. Re:Open Office by drsquare · · Score: 1

      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 simple and not too important.

    9. Re:Open Office by kayen_telva · · Score: 2

      proof ?

    10. Re:Open Office by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      How dare you, with one word you bring the GPs excellent post into question, didn't you notice the fact it was bashing MS, and you ask for proof? What are you sort of Micro$oft shill, yes that it, back to the borg you windoze luser.

      Now if you don't mind I'll get back to pretending excel doesn't do basic math correctly.

    11. Re:Open Office by cahiha · · Score: 1

      Why would they?

      Because they have 2-3% market share on the desktop and need more customers.

      They already have a great, consistent, good-looking GUI

      Ah, yes, the myth of Macintosh consistency. Never mind that it's a hodgepodge of APIs (Cocoa, Carbon, Quartz, OpenGL, Swing, Java2D, etc.) and themes (silver, classic, gumdrop, Office, etc.).

      And who wants to run a server just to get an office program working?

      You, apparently, or how do you think the current OS X GUI works? Adding another protocol (X11) to the protocols it already understands is not a big deal.

      I can't think of anything more inefficient and pointless than running a GUI on top of another GUI.

      Yes, that's the problem: X11 runs on top of the OS X GUI. A good implementation would put it on equal footing with Carbon, OpenGL, and Cocoa as another choice.

      Programs should use the native GUI, there's no reason not to other than laziness and arrogance.

      No, "arrogance" is if you don't listen to potential customers and just try to shove your APIs down their throats. And at 2-3% market share, it's not just arrogance, it's stupidity.

    12. Re:Open Office by swillden · · Score: 1

      Programs should use the native GUI, there's no reason not to other than laziness and arrogance.

      No reason? How about portability? There are lots of great programs written for X11 that were never intended to run on a Mac. Thanks to OSX's X11 server, a great many of those can be run on a Mac. If Apple would put a little more effort into said server, they would even run fairly well on the Mac.

      Arrogance is the assumption that there's no value in any app that no one has ported to the native widget set.

      --
      Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
    13. Re:Open Office by adepali · · Score: 2, Informative

      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.

    14. Re:Open Office by drsquare · · Score: 1

      Because they have 2-3% market share on the desktop and need more customers.

      They're not going to get more customers by supporting Open Office. They already have a decent office suite. Linux has Open Office and it's hardly tearing up trees, because people want MS Office.

      A good implementation would put it on equal footing with Carbon, OpenGL, and Cocoa as another choice.

      Why? For even more inconsistency? May as well keep using the same APIs rather than having a whole pile of them. That's why Linux is a shitty desktop, all sorts of protocols and libraries all doing the same thing, and the result is a big mess. Apple know how to make a UI and don't make the same mistakes Linux do. That's why even when Linux is free and Mac OS is expensive, Linux still can't beat its market share.

    15. Re:Open Office by CMECC · · Score: 1

      I completely agree. And somewhat on-topic: Ever since I bought my Mac, I've searched for a good word processor for it. I bought iWorks & use NeoOffice/J, but haven't been satisfied. Neither can read documents containing tables from either WordPerfect or Word. I even called Corel to see if they knew of a Mac version, but WordPerfect discontinued their Mac version about 8 years ago.

      I have always used and loved WordPerfect on a PC for nearly 20 years now.

      It's sad to me that superior products so often lose to superior marketing of mediocre products. I've often said that Microsoft's motto is "superior marketing for mediocre products", but I later simplified Microsoft's motto to: "mediocrity for the masses".

    16. Re:Open Office by the+plant+doctor · · Score: 2, Informative

      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 LaTex for documents. ;)

    17. Re:Open Office by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Linux is a shitty desktop, all sorts of protocols and libraries

      The fact that you don't understand what they do doesn't make the gnome desktop for example shitty for its users.

    18. Re:Open Office by Krusty+Da+Klown · · Score: 1

      You could probably get one of your old DOS WordPerfect versions to run just fine under emulation

    19. Re:Open Office by anagama · · Score: 1

      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. Sure it has "line numbering" -- but if you intermix single and double spacing, the line numbering follows suit (this is required in legal briefs -- quotes exceding 3 lines length are traditionally single spaced with a hanging indent). The line numbering needs to be double spaced regardless of what spacing is used in the body text. The only option is to make the pleading paper line numbers into a background image -- but then you have to muck around with the L margin because the line numbers image is placed to the right of the margin -- right where the text is causing other problems. I so miss WordPerfect -- it made life so much easier.
      --
      What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
    20. Re:Open Office by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      "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 not odd because they're all alike; it's odd because it's not a very good spreadsheet!

      Lotus Improv was both a very different spreadsheet from the Excel/1-2-3/Openoffice/Appleworks/... way of doing things, and also much better if you needed to do any number crunching. (The Excel way of working constantly frustrates me, but apparently it's better for making lists, which is what most people use spreadsheets for.)

      In Improv, you can make arbitrary-dimensional arrays of data, and then organize it by whichever dimensions you want. But then, instead of writing things like "=A1*(B1-C1)" and choosing "Fill Down", you could simply write out (readable!) equations like "Profit = Price - Cost". When you made a view of your data, you just ask for a particular variable (in a table or graph), and it would use your equations to figure out the unknowns, without making you do the solving for it.

      I hope Steve remembers Improv when Apple releases a spreadsheet component for iWork. (Maybe Apple could buy out OmniOutliner and make that part of iWork, too -- that does a better job at making lists than even Excel.)

    21. Re:Open Office by Susan+In+Oz · · Score: 1

      With all due respect, as a corporate finance/M&A professional, there IS a big difference between spreadsheets, and Excel is an abortion. Improv (a Lotus product) was a great spreadsheet, a pleasure to use (and I am no fan of spreadsheeting) but it was introduced way too late to make any headway against Excel. I still keep an old NeXT Computer around for the sole purpose of running Improv. My sources tell me quite a few people nevertheless approached IBM after it acquired Lotus to buy Improv, even years after Lotus 1-2-3 was dead as a product, and IBM was not willing to sell it. A freeware attempt to recreate it, Flexisheet, got only about 2/3 of the way to being completed.

    22. Re:Open Office by cahiha · · Score: 1

      They're not going to get more customers by supporting Open Office.

      They might get more customers by supporting Linux and UNIX applications better in general, however, rather than telling everybody to port them.

      That's why Linux is a shitty desktop, all sorts of protocols and libraries all doing the same thing

      A Gnome desktop is more streamlined and consistent than a Macintosh: it uses a consistent theme, a single set of APIs, and a single set of preference settings.

      That's why even when Linux is free and Mac OS is expensive, Linux still can't beat its market share.

      Linux already has a bigger market share than Macintosh, and that's without Apple's PR budget.

    23. Re:Open Office by Bert64 · · Score: 1

      Sure,
      http://data.fas.harvard.edu/numerical_stability/g3 009.pdf
      http://www.lfp.uba.ar/moreno/TErrores2004/MSExcel/ statproc.pdf

      And you can always search google for more, excel is widely known for being mathematically inaccurate.

      --
      http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
    24. Re:Open Office by kayen_telva · · Score: 1

      interesting. does OOO suffer from this as well ?

    25. Re:Open Office by Bert64 · · Score: 1

      Not sure, tho it hasn't got a reputation for inaccuracy (yet).. Someone needs to look at it more thoroughly.. One of the papers talking about the inaccuracies of excel actually mentions gnumeric tho, and says that gnumeric is pretty good in terms in accuracy.

      --
      http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
  11. Re: Adobe InDesign by dhasenan · · Score: 2, Funny

    Well, that's an improvement, I guess. I'm a poor college student; I use Linux because I couldn't afford another Windows license when it last crashed completely, so I'll just go out and blow $700 on InDesign. No problem. I didn't really need to pay bills or rent. Or eat.

  12. BBEdit/Appleworks by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Why do people use "word processors" when all they need is a text editor?

    Seriously, I haven't used a "word processor" in years, except to read stupid infected files other people send me. Spreadsheets are more handy, but Appleworks/OO.o do just fine in this area. So does my HP49G+

    1. Re:BBEdit/Appleworks by xenoandroid · · Score: 1

      Probably because some projects require something a little more advanced than a text editor. Not everyone is just using their word processor as a 'super typewriter'.

    2. Re:BBEdit/Appleworks by hilaryduff · · Score: 1

      different fonts? spellcheck? logos? some of us print out documents

    3. Re:BBEdit/Appleworks by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      So you propose that I write my 20,000 word dissertation in a text editor? The automatic indexing creation and decent reference handling of modern word processors make them vital to anything academic.

    4. Re:BBEdit/Appleworks by commodoresloat · · Score: 1
      Why do people use "computers" when all they need is a pencil and paper?

      Seriously, I haven't used a "computer" in years, except to read stupid infected files other people send me. Crayons are more handy, but pencil and paper does just fine in this area. So does my Etch-a-Sketch.

  13. No Exchange Integration by solosaint · · Score: 2, Informative

    none of these offer complete exchange integration, so any office that runs exchange wont really benefit

    1. Re:No Exchange Integration by AKAImBatman · · Score: 1

      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. Maybe it's improved since the last time I tried it, but its quirks prevented it from capturing the lions share of the Mac Email Client market before Apple finally got their act together on Mail.app.

      What corporate offices *really* need, is a port of Evolution + Exchange Connector to the Mac. Now that would be cool.

    2. Re:No Exchange Integration by Knara · · Score: 1
      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 me for years why MS dropped support for Outlook on the Mac and went to Entourage. From my point of view, it made zero sense.

    3. Re:No Exchange Integration by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yeah, they don't work with Bobs Fancy Groupware Server either. Fancy that; no support for a non-standard, non-documented protocol. Who'd have thought?

    4. Re:No Exchange Integration by gander666 · · Score: 1

      Entourage 2004 is actually pretty good.

      I really tried to avoid the MS mail solution, and tried a few other clients (mail with the "imap" exchange mode, Eudora both as an imap client and a pop3 client, and finally mailsmith).

      However, since I travel a lot (23 weeks this year so far) and our VPN solution is piss-poor, I gave Entourage 2004 a try.

      Sureprisingly, it was easy to setup, it works via WebDAV so I can be lounging in a Starbucks in Indiana, sipping a cup o' joe, and get my mail like I was in the office, without using the lame OWA interface.

      I would have to say that the Entourage 2004 mail client is worth the upgrade for the entire Office package.

      (Powerpoint is still a blight on humanity though).

      Geoff

      --
      Suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were a member of Congress ... but I repeat myself. - Mark T
    5. Re:No Exchange Integration by snilloc · · Score: 1

      People have used Powerpoint to inflict great suffering, but the process of making a presentation is pretty slick. OOo's "Impress" is a crime against humanity though. I don't even care about page transitions or templates or anything. I just want to make presentations slightly more complicated than bullet points and it is such a PITA to use I gave up. Powerpoint 97 has a better interface and doesn't crash as much. (Yes, I submitted OOo crash reports.)

    6. Re:No Exchange Integration by solosaint · · Score: 1

      people, I said COMPLETE Exchange integration, if you use Entourage with Exchange, you cannot open other people's calendars, make an out-of-office message... but yeah, you can read email, but that isnt complete support, Outlook on Mac had better support, but only works on os 9

  14. Re:For Christ Sake by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I see in your comment's history that you were a /. subscriber. You're dumb enough to pay, troll and be off-topic at the same time? I LOLed!

  15. ::sigh:: and some people wonder... by ciurana · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    Anonymous Coward wrote:

    Seriously, I haven't used a "word processor" in years, except to read stupid infected files other people send me. Spreadsheets are more handy, but Appleworks/OO.o do just fine in this area.

    ...and some people wonder why they can't find a job...

    Cheers,

    E
    --
    http://eugeneciurana.com | http://ciurana.eu
    1. Re:::sigh:: and some people wonder... by peakoil · · Score: 1

      I don't know, I kinda agree with you. There are many word processors like abiword, and open office (java infected!) and simple text typing like kword, emac. These are for Linux users of course (expect OpenOffice). Windows users are well.... different. As for jobs, now sir they are offshoring them in India, China, Latina America, and Eastern Europe. Could it be the reason why many people are not able to find a job?

    2. Re:::sigh:: and some people wonder... by mdarksbane · · Score: 1

      There are definitely a LOT of things that require a real word processor. Some of them even need the auto-indexing and other fancy feature of Word.

      But really, for 99% of what I and I bet most people in my situation (a student) ever need one for (papers for school, occasional documentation at work) would be COMPLETELY covered by a basic RTF editor like Text Edit.

      And yet every year they tell us we need to buy office :(

    3. Re:::sigh:: and some people wonder... by UtucXul · · Score: 1
      There are definitely a LOT of things that require a real word processor. Some of them even need the auto-indexing and other fancy feature of Word.

      I don't think I've ever seen anything that requires the features of a word processor (other than reading other people's word processor written documents).
      A text editor and latex (plus bibtex) can do everything (and more) that a wordprocessor can do.
  16. Re:For Christ Sake by bohemian_observer · · Score: 0

    Sure, thats what I do. I am the "underminer". LOL!

  17. Re: Adobe InDesign by zxnos · · Score: 1

    i am impressed. pirated adobe software is all over my campus. i dont know if there is a linux veriosn but... "$384 Adobe Creative Suite"

    --
    always mosh clockwise
  18. NeoOffice is quite nifty by ScuxxletButt · · Score: 1

    NeoOffice/J runs only a little slow on my G4 Cube but fully functional and quite stable, plus I can now share documents between my Windows, Mac, Solaris, and Linux boxes with NeoOffice/J-OpenOffice.

    MicroWho?

    1. Re:NeoOffice is quite nifty by anagama · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I know the Cube is way faster, but it reminds me of an iBook, 300mhz G3, I recently fixed. NeoOffice takes about 90 seconds to load on that old beast with inadequate memory. Truth is, it barely functions. AbiWord loads up in under 20 seconds and is quite responsive. It's almost perfect but has a serious flaw that ruins everything -- a the toolbar "floats" rather than appears in the doucument's window. The title bar is initially loaded under the menu bar, which is fine. Unfortunately, it gets hidden by open documents and requires a manual resize of the document window. Granted, the old iBooks were pretty low res, but that certainly keeps AbiWord out of the running for my powerbook.

      --
      What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
  19. Microsoft has to hate this... by Hamster+Lover · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Microsoft has to hate this... by jschoenberg · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:Microsoft has to hate this... by MemoryDragon · · Score: 1

      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 of not being the same word proc. To my knowlege works in newer versions shares the same editing engine as word.

    3. Re:Microsoft has to hate this... by Bert64 · · Score: 1

      Can you send me some of these documents that break modern versions of word? And possibly give details on how to reliably create them.. I'd like to prove a point to some work colleagues.

      --
      http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
    4. Re:Microsoft has to hate this... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Sure. Just create document called FUD.DOC, get infected with a virus, put it on a 10 year old floppy, and then leave it out in the rain.

      Maybe if your work colleagues aren't experiencing these problems, it is a uncommon issue that's blown way out of proportion by the helpdeskers that inhabit this site.

    5. Re:Microsoft has to hate this... by jschoenberg · · Score: 1

      DOS word document? I guess I underestimated the files you were referring to. DOS-based Word is 10 year-old software. Backwards compatibility for such old software is, IMO not necessary or required. I prefer software that abandons the older technology quicker rather than hanging on to it.

      Seriously....Word for DOS. That belongs in a museum, not on a computer. What, you got a 386 running that?

    6. Re:Microsoft has to hate this... by J.Random+Hacker · · Score: 1

      Consider this: We've been installing software controls for transit trains for the last 20 years or so. Extensions (adding track), and upgrades (improving performance or train density) have to mesh cleanly with the existing system. That means examining work that might be 10-20 years old. I'd work with it electronically than scan, clean up, *then* edit.

      I'm sure other industries have similar issues. It's only the PC that is so ephemeral that they can afford to turn away from relatively recent (in historical terms) formats. Seriously -- 10 year old formats still have *great* value.

      So -- choose your formats wisely. You'll probably need to work with them for a long time to come, or redo your work repeatedly.

      Cheers.

    7. Re:Microsoft has to hate this... by Serapth · · Score: 1

      [i]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[/i]

      Ok... I may be really bad at math... but... If you havent bought an office suite from MS in 5 years, but what prompted you to take that stance was a product from 2003.... umm..... .... .... ummmm.......

      Ok.... ummm....

    8. Re:Microsoft has to hate this... by MemoryDragon · · Score: 1

      Actually the easiest way to break compatibility is via ole... Also try some heavy formatting in between word versions, once the document becomes big enough, or long enough breaking between platforms is a no brainer.

    9. Re:Microsoft has to hate this... by MemoryDragon · · Score: 1

      10 years is nothing, if you go the public institutions way, storage times of 30-100 years have to be considered, and a file format which breaks after 5-6 years is a do not use it issue.

  20. TextEdit by pbooktebo · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  21. Re: Adobe InDesign by dhasenan · · Score: 1
    Hm, you seem to be out for a fight. At least you're being moderately informative.

    If I need the software, it's for a project with a professor, and that professor can use grant money to get it for me. They could get me Quark Xpress, probably. On the other hand, if I have personal projects that could be accomplished very efficiently with MSPub or equivalent, or inefficiently using HTML, I'll have to use HTML. With cascading stylesheets, that's not as troublesome as it would have been previously, but it still isn't very effective.

    Here's something that I really can't do with HTML, short of changing text to images and rotating them using the GIMP: making greeting cards. Store-bought cards are gauche these days, and if I can't draw them by hand, I'm left with printing out the parts and pasting them together. Not a good solution. Using a typesetting program would allow me to accomplish my goal quickly and easily.

    I think it would be relatively simple to make a dedicated typesetting program starting from OOo Writer. I'm not entirely certain, though--you'd have to implement print orientation, maybe object rotation, and set up pages to start blank, not as targets for entering text. Then text boxes and layout guides, and you're nearly done. I think. I'm not as familiar with OOo as I perhaps should be. But it's largely a user interface issue--making paper sizing and such simple and accessible.

  22. another alternative by sdedeo · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I use Mellel, 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.

    --
    Protect your liberties. Donate to the ACLU
    1. Re:another alternative by Stormwatch · · Score: 1

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

  23. Excuse me, but... by hdante · · Score: 1

    Although I don't even have Windows on my PC, I could use Microsoft Office if there were a Linux version. And I mean it by comparing to OO.o, because while the former may be bigger than it in bytes, both feel heavy the same way. I mean, wouldn't switch to MS Office over LaTeX, but I wouldn't feel bad switching from Writer to Word, Calc to Excel, etc... I've had many bad experiences with Word, already seen Excel crash and I even saw Power Point going into "safe mode" once, but Open Office seems as bloated as MS'.

  24. Office 2004: Hard to beat by JeffTL · · Score: 1

    ...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 that can be done for free or at all cheaper than buying MS Office, it's a good thing for those people.

    Office is pretty expensive, particularly if you only need simple functions. Why buy Photoshop when you can do what you need with Elements...or the Gimp?

    1. Re:Office 2004: Hard to beat by dispensa · · Score: 1

      I agree. Believe it or not, MS Office 2k4 for Mac is some of the very best software Microsoft has produced. It works, it works really well, and it doesn't kill my powerbook while using it.

      I can't speak for NeoOffice, but OOo doesn't come close to providing the Mac experience, and Microsoft has done the job pretty darn well.

      It just goes to show you that smart coders can code cool stuff if they aren't shackled by two decades of brain-dead architectural assumptions and backward compatibility restrictions.

  25. Nothing like stating your opinion as a fact by 93+Escort+Wagon · · Score: 2, Insightful

    "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.

    --
    #DeleteChrome
    1. Re:Nothing like stating your opinion as a fact by Doctor_Jest · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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 one, and it does what most casual users of office suites need it to do.

      And in those offices or homes, as long as its able to save in a format others might be able to open, I think they couldn't care less what icon they pushed to get there. :) Thus we all benefit. Microsoft is kept on its toes making Office better because there is something that can take away their market share, and users can choose between competing suites to find one that best suits their style.

      I also think the reason this works now on the Apple platform more than it ever has is due to the demographic of Apple users expanding from the non-techie base. OS X has made it more "geek friendly" and by the same token, made it more of a platform that can benefit from choices offered by the Open Source Community. Sure there are those who will always choose MS Office over any alternative. But that doesn't represent everyone, and with the expanding, diversifying base of Apple users, it won't have to.

      But I do agree with your point that there are users who won't care. Just that I think there are more and more users who will (and do) care, all thanks to the Unix underpinnings of OS X.

      Heck, it's made me a switcher. :)

      --
      It's the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.
    2. Re:Nothing like stating your opinion as a fact by ClosedSource · · Score: 1

      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.

    3. Re:Nothing like stating your opinion as a fact by Doctor_Jest · · Score: 1

      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 hell it is now between Office versions. (I won't hold my breath, though... heheheh)

      Microsoft frequently breaks backwards compatibility with its suite, so in competing with itself (versions) Office never is 100% either.

      I've always thought that Office 97 was the right mix of features and reliability, and things brought out after it were becoming just fat and bloated. Maybe that can be the feature set to shoot for. *shrug*

      --
      It's the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.
  26. Scribus? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Scribus is available through fink, but if you don't know what that means, you're in for an adventure getting it installed (X11, packages, etc.). And compared even to PageMaker or Publisher, it's still quite rough around the edges, makes Quark look like a Lexus and InDesign look like a Rolls Royce.

    But it'll damn sure make a greeting card, if you're patient enough.

  27. nothing really yet by b17bmbr · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

    --
    My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
  28. Re: Adobe InDesign by torstenvl · · Score: 1

    For some reason I randomly remembered this really neat local business. Have you ever heard of Gwen Frostic? You might want to check out her site. I remember being impressed with the beauty and quality the first time I was presented with such a card. <shameless plug>

  29. Microsoft Office still preferred... by Fulg0re- · · Score: 1

    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 of possible document incompatibilities is one often not taken.

    At the end of the day, it is great to have alternatives. Moving away from MS Office, however, is not really feasible in the real world (well, not yet at least!)

    Plus, students can get a huge discount on Office 2004 anyhow. Is free better than $100 or so? That's for you to decide.

    1. Re:Microsoft Office still preferred... by cahiha · · Score: 0, Flamebait

      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.

      By that argument, MS Office is even more limited because MS Office can't even import native Keynote or OpenOffice documents at all.

      In reality, the non-Microsoft office suites (it is incorrect referring to them as "clones", since Microsoft didn't even come up with the concept) are full-fledged office suites that exceed MS Office functionality in many areas.

      Moving away from MS Office, however, is not really feasible in the real world (well, not yet at least!)

      That's pure FUD. I exchange documents with lots of people. Even though I actually have a copy of MS Office installed (site license), I haven't had to bother firing it up in more than a year: OpenOffice has handled everything just fine and I use it as the default handler for MS Office documents. On the Windows partition on my laptop I erased MS Office altogether--it was just taking up space.

      And with Microsoft's free viewer programs, Microsoft's move to XML formats, and web-based conversion services, you don't even need MS Office around as a safety blanket anymore.

      Don't confuse your special situation and preferences with the reality at large.

    2. Re:Microsoft Office still preferred... by Alioth · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.

    3. Re:Microsoft Office still preferred... by Glenman · · Score: 1

      You wrote: "Don't confuse your special situation and preferences with the reality at large." Take your own advice, if you ever work for an organisation that insists on using complex word templates you will sadly discover that only M$ Office will fail to corrupt the files. Think Free cost me hours of work on this account and OOO was no better. Of course if your needs are simple you can stick with pico.

    4. Re:Microsoft Office still preferred... by cahiha · · Score: 0, Flamebait

      Take your own advice, if you ever work for an organisation that insists on using complex word templates

      Yes, some people in the real world cannot move away from MS Office. But there exist people in the real world that can. Therefore, your claim is wrong, and my claim is right: it is feasible in the real world to move away from MS Office, it is simply not feasible for everybody.

    5. Re:Microsoft Office still preferred... by Glenman · · Score: 1

      "Therefore, your claim is wrong, and my claim is right: it is feasible in the real world to move away from MS Office, it is simply not feasible for everybody." The absolutisit claim about the real world was not mine it was FulgOre's, my point is that those of us who work for organistions like this are not a small specialised subset, there are millions of us locked in to M$ by institutional policies because these tend to be big institutions. For nearly a decade I used Linux at home (back in the days when StarOffice was first ported to Linux), although there were always some problems I could manage, but my current university forced me to change over because of those templates (a change I was happier to make as it did not require me to use Windows now that I had switched to OSX). The problem with these debates is that it tends to be those who do not need more than TextEdit berating those of us who are locked in by our employers.

    6. Re:Microsoft Office still preferred... by Fulg0re- · · Score: 1

      I didn't say that it is not feasible, I said that it was not really feasible. I completely agree that it is possible to use all these Office "clones" and most of the time, not have any document incompatibilities. However, the main issue is that MS Office is the de facto standard.

      An earlier claim arguing that MS Office is constrained because it cannot import native Keynote files is problematic because Keynote is not a de facto standard whatsoever. Unfortunately, that semantical argument doesn't work in this context.

      People are constrained by their employers choice of software, and the fact that most organizations and academic institutions have standardized on MS Office isn't a coincidence either.

      Moreover, the first thing that most people unfamiliar to the Macintosh platform usually worry about is if MS Office works. Just something to think about.

    7. Re:Microsoft Office still preferred... by cahiha · · Score: 1

      my point is that those of us who work for organistions like this are not a small specialised subset, there are millions of us locked in to M$ by institutional policies

      And there are also many millions who are not locked into Microsoft by institutional policies. For many of those, OpenOffice is a practical, real-world solution.

      And the number of people in your situation is shrinking: workflow and forms are moving to the web, MS Office is switching to XML, and OOo 2.0 has even better import/export.

  30. RagTime !!! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    What about RagTime ?

    There always that Office Myth. I use RagTime since the early 90's. Its been out there for far over a decade and nobody seems to be aware of it.

    Nice Spreadsheet, Layout and Text App.
    You dont always need that dinosaur MS Office

    btw: the home version is free !

  31. Without NeoOffice/J, no iBook by Nice2Cats · · Score: 2, Interesting
    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.

    1. Re:Without NeoOffice/J, no iBook by jkabbe · · Score: 1

      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.

    2. Re:Without NeoOffice/J, no iBook by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Actually, MS Office for Mac is available for $150.

  32. But none of them... by kronocide · · Score: 1, Informative

    ...can correctly open an MS Word document with two tables. :-)

    1. Re:But none of them... by kronocide · · Score: 1

      Eh, this is not flamebait, it's a fact. And it's perhaps the most important reason for MS's operating system monopoly. As long as you need MS Office to share documents, offices are going to have to run Windows or Mac OS. Microsoft knows this.

  33. Apple's fault by cahiha · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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 Carbon and Cocoa are: X11 should be preinstalled and run automatically on every Macintosh, and its window management should be tightly integrated with the Macintosh desktop.

    The fact that it isn't (and that X11 is dog slow on Macintosh) is Apple politics: Apple doesn't want X11 to run too well on Macintosh--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. To prevent that, Apple wants X11 to run just well enough so that people can use workstation applications on Macintosh if they have to, but so that X11 applications continue to look foreign and don't integrate very well.

    1. Re:Apple's fault by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:Apple's fault by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Talk out your ass much?

    3. Re:Apple's fault by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      > You've got to be kidding. No one likes X

      Huh? I usually run my X11 applications off of an compute server as my laptop doesn't have enough memory to run them all at the same time. Should I use VNC instead? That would be dog slow on our wifi lan. So for me and others X11 is essential.

      > Nobody is ever going to bother developing X-
      > based interfaces for Mac software

      Nonsense. See above.

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

      This isn't a problem in practice as there exists only two, maybe three competing widget sets. All of them can use the engines from fd.o. So in practice this isn't an argument.

    4. Re:Apple's fault by cahiha · · Score: 1

      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, Swing), four different graphics APIs (Carbon, Quartz, Java2D, OpenGL), and three different themes (classic, silver, Cocoa). Third party apps already use dozens of different widget sets. Another graphics API and two more toolkits won't make a difference: they'll be able to emulate the common Apple L&F as well as all the others.

    5. Re:Apple's fault by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      >Another graphics API and two more toolkits won't make a difference: they'll be able to emulate the common Apple L&F as well as all the others.

      But why would anyone bother doing this? There are an insignificant number of people who want to use the one advantage X would have, running applications over a network. I don't doubt that with enough investment, X could fit in, but they won't be able to do it automatically in any case. There'd need to also be tools that allow people to make these X applications, and there'd be no reason to make them when no one is going to use them. Just because no one uses X now, when it's no good, doesn't mean people will start when it's any better. If Microsoft made an excellent X server for Windows, would anyone develop X-based Windows applications? Of course not; it's obviously absurd.

    6. Re:Apple's fault by Listen+Up · · Score: 1

      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 that X11 is right now.

      If people want Aqua apps, write the code for Aqua and Mac OS X. Otherwise, stop bitching. X11 should be used on Apple computers so that people who need to time to convert X11 apps to Aqua can code in smaller steps. X11 on Mac OS X is not meant as a simultaneous windowing environment to use instead of Aqua.

    7. Re:Apple's fault by Listen+Up · · Score: 1

      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.

    8. Re:Apple's fault by cahiha · · Score: 1

      But why would anyone bother doing this?

      Because the way it is, UNIX and Linux applications run poorly on Macintosh.

      There are an insignificant number of people who want to use the one advantage X would have, running applications over a network

      The advantage of X is the huge number of scientific, educational, and engineering applications. Network transparency is a bonus.

      Just because no one uses X now, when it's no good, doesn't mean people will start when it's any better.

      X11 is far more widely used than Macintosh: every UNIX workstation and every Linux desktop machine uses it. A large fraction of Windows and Macintosh machines at universities also use X11 to access applications.

      X11 is the second most widely used window system today, with Macintosh being at best a distant third.

    9. Re:Apple's fault by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      >>Just because no one uses X now, when it's no good, doesn't mean people will start when it's any better.

      >X11 is far more widely used than Macintosh

      I meant used on Macs, like where you said "As long as the X11 server for Macintosh keeps sucking as badly as it does, indeed, nobody will bother." So, see above. People aren't going to start using it, except for makeshift ports, which are not the sort of thing that are going to convince people to buy a Mac. Aside from you, is there anybody who likes OS X but wants to use X instead? Linux has got X and this fact hasn't convinced very many people that it's a good replacement for Windows. Windows lack of X hasn't hindered it either. X is never going to become the predominant API on OS X and you're the only one who thinks this is desirable or even plausible.

    10. Re:Apple's fault by HuguesT · · Score: 1

      Thanks for your opinion.

      I may be the odd one out here, as I type this from my iBook under OS/X, but I miss the simplicity and (yes!) speed of X11. If Linux wasn't running so poorly on this hardware I'd already have switched. The lack of driver for the airport card is the main roadblock here.

      Aqua is a huge CPU hog and has too few applications running for it. My CPU meter never dips below 15% usage even when doing nothing. Many commercial apps are in fact still Carbon and don't integrate well, and suck yet more. As it is it is almost impossible to get a consistent desktop under OS/X. Since I like the FOSS apps I also have to run a number of X11 apps, which do integrate even less with Aqua.

      I do in fact enjoy more consistency under Linux. To me aqua is a huge disappointment.

  34. Evolution by cahiha · · Score: 0, Redundant

    Evolution offers Exchange integration. Of course, it's an X11 application, and Apple's X11 server sucks, so it's a pain to use under OS X.

    Once Apple comes around to actually supporting X11 well, then all this software will become available for Macintosh.

    1. Re:Evolution by aristotle-dude · · Score: 1

      X11 sucks. I'm waiting for a native port. X11 is too primitive.

      --
      Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
    2. Re:Evolution by cahiha · · Score: 1

      X11 sucks. I'm waiting for a native port. X11 is too primitive.

      It is unlikely people will bother porting a lot of Gnome software directly to Macintosh. However, there are several efforts in the works on OS X backends for Gtk+ so you may still be getting a "native" version of Evolution at some point.

      As for whether X11 "sucks", well, that's a matter of opinion. X11 already has several times more users than the Macintosh GUI, and the latest X11 servers have graphics capabilities and hardware acceleration that put OS X to shame.

  35. Re:Open source is cool but ( Sçore:5, Informa by xenoandroid · · Score: 1

    Nice try with the self-modding, but unfortunately you're wrong. Java is capable of being very fast and beautiful and X11 seems to get the job done just fine for machines that use it natively.

  36. Sorry, no can do. by Pliep · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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 you know, I don't want this. But I appreciate the work, and see the importance of alternatives for MS Office. NeoOffice/J is just not there yet, and I'm hoping someone can someday create an Office suite that offers more than being just an MS Office duplicate with an ugly UI.

    1. Re:Sorry, no can do. by Pantoffel · · Score: 1

      I totally agree with this. Moreover, as long as the keyboard shortcuts in NeoOffice/J for cursor navigation are wrong (and not configurable), I simply won't use it.

  37. Interesting... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0


    Could this open some eyes and increase interest in alternative (Linux, Mac) offerings?

  38. vi or vim by djdavetrouble · · Score: 1

    learn it, love it, live it.

    --
    music lover since 1969
    1. Re: vi or vim by gidds · · Score: 1
      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 or write WP and rich text files, it has no spelling checker, printing, clipboard support, and doesn't integrate with other GUI apps (e.g. menus and mouse).

      Horses for courses.

      --

      Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.

    2. Re: vi or vim by djdavetrouble · · Score: 1

      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.

      --
      music lover since 1969
    3. Re: vi or vim by gidds · · Score: 1
      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 text field, for example. (Easy on OS X: just press up or down!) Especially given that Dell have seen fit to change the traditional layout and put the page up/down keys at the top/middle of the group of 3 rather than at the middle/bottom...

      --

      Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.

    4. Re: vi or vim by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Not true, OS X can be run completely without a mouse. It's always been possible to tab between all controls (it's just turned off by default), and with universal access you can find all kinds of alternate methods for controlling the GUI.

      A few years ago my mouse broke, and I was just a kid so it took me a while to organize another one. I used my mac for almost a week with no mouse.

    5. Re: vi or vim by gidds · · Score: 1
      Up until recently I was running 10.2, and I never found a way to tab onto buttons and other components (except in certain circumstances like sheets). I thought that that was updated in 10.4, but it may have been in 10.3.

      --

      Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.

  39. What I should have said... by Hamster+Lover · · Score: 2, Informative

    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 opened it in OO where it did and saved it. Weird, but it saved me a lot of work. :)

    And actually, they did break compatibility with MS Works documents in Office XP/2003. Office 97 would open legacy MS Works documents back to version 1.0, if I am not mistaken. Even with the file conversion utilities installed in Office XP it would not open any legacy MS Works documents correctly. I have since learned it is better to save in multiple formats.

    You make an excellent point that Word in Office is really more than most people need. It's just that Office is the defacto word processing standard and anyone in a professional environment would be familiar with the program. Ask anyone what you need to write a document in Windows and the instant answer would be "Office".

    1. Re:What I should have said... by jschoenberg · · Score: 1

      Yes, and it will be a great day when they get the XML doc format into production on Office. Which makes a lot of sense. I don't think consumers are going to pay the hefty price tag for Office for much longer anyway, so it makes business sense to open it up and allow consumers to use leaner software but still share files with work, friends, etc.

  40. Re:For Christ Sake by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    You are right in some sense. RedHat made a mistake by introducing LaTeX as a publishing software. It is not. LaTeX is for scientific writing (translated: it's not for idiots like you), and using it for anything else is kind of kludgy.

    On the other hand, using anything else for scientific writing is unimaginable for us scientists (well, at least the mathematically minded scientists -- just in case some people define scientists differently).

  41. Nisus Writer by jcr · · Score: 1

    Whenever I need more than TextEdit, I use Nisus Writer. You can download it from nisus.com, not sure how long their trial license lasts..

    -jcr

    --
    The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
  42. I use ThinkFree by Ilgaz · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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/

    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.

  43. Other office suites? by polyp2000 · · Score: 1

    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 ?

    --
    Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
    1. Re:Other office suites? by anagama · · Score: 1

      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 changed under Obama? Nothing Good
  44. Re:Open source is cool but ( Sçore:5, Informa by kayen_telva · · Score: 1

    azureus ? jedit ? java can rock if its done properly

  45. For me, Word is just a file viewer. by argent · · Score: 0

    Only once have I used Microsoft Word as anything but a viewer for files produced by someone else, and the experience was agonizing. It would have been easier for me to produce the document I finally arrived at using raw HTML and "vi", because Word has no concept of a textual object larger than a paragraph or a table cell. Everything else, chapters, lists, sections, blocks, are faked by applying styles to paragraphs and inheriting styles from one paragraph to another. Pasted text carried along with it the context of the source section, inserting paragraphs in lists resulted in the lists being split. There was absolutely no way to distinguish content and layout, I ended up spending more time reapplying layout and styles than working on the text itself.

    Ever since then I have simply written content in plain text and left it to the people in Word Processing to make it fit the corporate style.

    No wonder IE doesn't support CSS, nobody at Microsoft has experience with a real text processing system.

    Excel, on the other hand, is a pretty decent spreadsheet. Mostly, I still just use it as a viewer... because I rarely deal with material that needs a spreadsheet to handle... but it's not because I'm actively avoiding it like I am Word.

    So I simply can't understand this need for an "Office Suite" for the Mac. A good spreadsheet, yes, but OS X already comes with a better word processor than Word in TextEdit.

  46. What about AbiWord? by OrangeHairMan · · Score: 2, Interesting

    http://www.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

    1. Re:What about AbiWord? by anagama · · Score: 1

      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.

      --
      What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
  47. simple formatting test: OO.o passes, Neo fails by dankelley · · Score: 1
    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 document for verification, because it is contains confidential information.

    I had done a lot of work on the document to get clean line/paragraph/page breaks. For example, to prevent the last line of a page being the first line of a paragraph, I would insert a page break. (I know, I know, this sort of thing is handled automatically with TeX and its variants, but I had to use MSWord for collaboration. Even my test with OO.o and Neo was just a test -- my colleagues have neither.)

    I think it is common to care about precise page breaks, etc., and therefore I think a "compatible" program should obey these, at the very least. Otherwise it's impossible to actually use the document. Mail it to someone and ask a question about page 8, and they will have a different page 8.

    In OO.o, the document view had the right page breaks. Further tests would be useful, but at least OO.o is worth considering for collaborative work.

    In Neo, the page breaks were wrong. Thus Neo fails the test.

    PS. please, let's not get into the matter of one version of MSOffice being incompatible with another. That's true but irrelevant since the granting agency to which I am sending the document has a compatible version, as do my colleagues with whom I am working on the project. And, please, let's not get into the matter that the agency should accept OO.o files. They don't, and they make the rules, not me.

    Conclusion: OO.o may be worth considering for collaborative use. Neo is not.

    1. Re:simple formatting test: OO.o passes, Neo fails by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      Don't want to sound offending, but it seems you never have explored the opportunities of word processors:

      I had done a lot of work on the document to get clean line/paragraph/page breaks. For example, to prevent the last line of a page being the first line of a paragraph, I would insert a page break.

      This problem is called "orphans and widows". OOo is quite good in handling it. MS Word isn't. So Word is your real problem. If Word was properly worked on, you wouldn't have to insert a page break. But you could at least try to use the "prevent orphans and widows" features in Word, OOo, and Neo.

      I think it is common to care about precise page breaks, etc., and therefore I think a "compatible" program should obey these, at the very least. Otherwise it's impossible to actually use the document. Mail it to someone and ask a question about page 8, and they will have a different page 8. [...] PS. please, let's not get into the matter of one version of MSOffice being incompatible with another. That's true but irrelevant since the granting agency to which I am sending the document has a compatible version, as do my colleagues with whom I am working on the project.

      The problem with losing formatting isn't unique to different versions of Word. It can easily happen if both sides have the same version. All it takes is a different default printer since MS Office receives the metrics from the printer. OOo's layout is printer independent. Moreover, MS Word sometimes loses formatting on the same machine. Just save your doc and reopen it. Sometimes, very strange things happen to your documents in Word. And you if need to be absolutely sure about layout, use PDF. That's the way to (and PDF export is an OOo/Neo feature).

      Word's capabilities are absolutely inadequate for professional use, and the only reason for using it is the secret file format. If professional writers were serious about their profession, they would avoid this crap by all means

    2. Re:simple formatting test: OO.o passes, Neo fails by dankelley · · Score: 1
      Thanks for the advice. I appreciate it. By the way, I know what widows and orphans are (I've read the TeX book cover to cover) and I only use MSWord when I am forced to; that's why I don't know all the settings. Therefore, your comment about MSWord (et alias) having a feature on this is very helpful to me, and I appreciate it.

      Also, your words on font metrics are informative and may prove useful to me at some later time. So, I appreciate them as well.

      I hope that by replying to this, your helpful comment will be highlighted in the /. system, so that others can benefit from your advice.

  48. Apple's fault (for making NeoOffice/J possible) by Kaseijin · · Score: 3, Insightful
    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, wait.
    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, 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.
    1. Re:Apple's fault (for making NeoOffice/J possible) by cahiha · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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 put it in my login items.

      See, that's one of the problems with Apple's X11 server: it is so big, heavy, and inefficient. The X11 protocol is simple; a good implementation of it as part of the OS X GUI would probably be more lightweight than the menu bar clock.

    2. Re:Apple's fault (for making NeoOffice/J possible) by Anonymous+Brave+Guy · · Score: 1
      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 GPL, surely the GPL forbids that? Did they do something weird under Sun's SISSL instead?
      --
      If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
    3. Re:Apple's fault (for making NeoOffice/J possible) by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Can you tell me why you think "the X11 protocol is simple; a good implementation of it as part of the OS X GUI would probably be more lightweight than the menu bar clock"? Because my X server is currently using 174 MB of memory.

    4. Re:Apple's fault (for making NeoOffice/J possible) by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      uhm? Log on to the developer site for Apple... they give you the freaking code to have X11 hook into OS X! You can hook it to carbon, cocoa, hell even core foundation! All you have to do is include a header file and zingo bingo.

      Does anyone do it? nooooooooooo

  49. Some Notes on Mellel by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Mellel is not shareware, it's a regular old commercial program. However, you can download a complete working demo to try it out, and it only costs $39! A bargain for a very good program. The developers and the Mellel community are very generous people who treat users with respect and provide a lot of online support.

    As for .doc files, Mellel, which has its own file format, will only import and export .doc files, and with less success than say, OO. It's not a good choice if you must exchange files all the time with colleagues who use Word. But on its own, it's a great word processor. Nisus Writer Express is also another product worth a look. Note that Nisus is also commercial ($69).

  50. Remove head from ass, please by CrazyWingman · · Score: 1

    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," or, "I pick the right tool for the job." Guess what, you might want to take a look at another option to see if IT is the right tool for the job, and good enough for you.

    Quit following the goddamn zealot herd!

    1. Re:Remove head from ass, please by IANAAC · · Score: 1
      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.

  51. I have both, but... by chadseld · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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 remember formatting, styles, tables, lists, graphic positions and it often corrupts the document I am working on. NeoOffice/J is rock solid in all these areas. I have never gotten a corrupt document. It remembers things like lists, tables, graphics positions, formatting, etc... Having a Mac, I have not had a chance to play with OpenOffice 2.x, but let me say this. If OpenOffice adds support for advanced scripting (via something better than VBS, say Ruby, Python, Perl...) Microsoft will have their ass handed to them.

    1. Re:I have both, but... by argent · · Score: 1

      Maybe the PC version of Office is better, it has to be or no one would use it.

      Don't bet on it. Office doesn't understand about any chunk of text bigger than a paragraph, it fakes everything by stitching paragraphs together. Lists, tables, sections, chapters, nesting, everything else is handled by having paragraphs with the right attributes and controlling what a paragraph inherits from the previous paragraph.

      People find this perfectly OK.

      I find it incomprehensible.

  52. I don't understand... by gexen · · Score: 1

    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 around and I for one would never want an alternative to the best.

    1. Re:I don't understand... by Mspangler · · Score: 1

      "Other than price, I don't understand why anybody would NOT want to use Office for OS X."

      Other than the price is all I need. $350 is just too much. I have no use for powerpoint at all, and word processors are a dime a dozen, given I don't need the full power of Word. So, all I am really interested in is Excel. And even Excel is not worth that much.

      IF Bill will sell me Excel alone for $99, I'll buy it. Otherwise, something else will have to do.

      On that topic, is Gnumeric compatable with Tiger yet? I want to have a "spread-off" between that and Neo-office. Since both Abiword and Neo-office are acceptable for word processors, the winning spreadsheet determines which suite I get.

    2. Re:I don't understand... by ChristTrekker · · Score: 1

      You said it: price. Most people use less than half the capabilities of Word, less than a quarter the capabilities of Excel, and have no need at all for presentations, databases, or groupware. If I could pay $50 for something that did only those things as well as MS does them, yeah, I'd probably pony up the $50. Until then, anything else looks better than a $400 MS Office suite.

  53. This Account Has Been Suspended by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    This Account Has Been Suspended
    Please contact the billing/support department as soon as possible.

    Thanks Slashdot....

  54. What about citation/reference manager? by bikerguy99 · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:What about citation/reference manager? by bill_911 · · Score: 1

      The citation/reference manager issue is discussed often on OOo writer forums. You can learn more there.

      If you are willing to invest in the learning curve, it is feasible to switch from EndNote to open source reference managers (BibDesk and others).

      While non-EndNote solutions may not integrate into NeoJ exactly like the EndNote-Word solution, they do work.

      Besides, EndNot is the worst OS X application on my computer. It is horrible.

      NeoJ Rocks!

  55. Bah... by ztwilight · · Score: 1

    No one needs office anymore. We have VIM!

    --
    Who moved my sig?
  56. no one's picked the lightweight contender by St.+Arbirix · · Score: 1

    Abiword.

    I have Abiword installed alongside NeoOffice/J. TextEdit, that comes with OSX, opens most .doc files and Abiword opens the rest. I use NeoOffice for PowerPoint and writing my own stuff which I always print in the labs from a PDF.

    --
    Direct away from face when opening.
  57. NeoOffice is nice. by Thaidog · · Score: 1

    PDF export is essential.

    --

    ||| I still can't believe Parkay's not butter.

  58. Does somebody have a GOOD answer to layout? by arete · · Score: 1

    I really need to be able to accurately layout mostly-text documents, send them to novice users, and have them be able to edit the text without everything exploding. At least for those other contributors, the software needs to be cheap.

    As another poster pointed out, .doc is NOT accurate. Office is not accurate _even with Office_ especially if the version/OS/resolution/default printer is different. All problems I have - OSX, Linux and Win are all relevant for me.

    I welcome ANY general suggestions on this issue. I also welcome suggestions about LaTeX implementations that are as useable as "word processors" to achieve basic functionality. I don't know a lot about LaTeX, but at this moment it seems like my best hope for the way I want it.

    Since PDF is the only commonly readable layout-precise format. What I really want is a reasonably priced PDF _editor_ that works like an Word Processor. Things like being able to add text and having it automatically reflow on more than a per-line basis.

    What I think will most likely be my solution will be when a product like InDesign can export to PDF AND embed all it's other information, so the _same_ PDF was readable for free but editable for other people with InDesign. This would be much more reasonable if there was an inexpensive version of InDesign, even if it only let you perform basic features.

    Again, any suggestions are welcomed.

    My $0.02 on the original topic: MSOffice v.X is the best MSOffice I've ever seen. NeoOffice sounds like it's good but I haven't used it, Appleworks is okay if I remember, iWork seems outstanding but they don't have a spreadsheet yet. I believe it's coming.

    --
    Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot
    1. Re:Does somebody have a GOOD answer to layout? by J.Random+Hacker · · Score: 1

      You might have a look at LyX, which is a LaTeX front end, which looks promising to me.

      There is also TeXShop, which is a Mac OS front end for LaTeX.

      I personally use LaTeX all the time for fairly large documents (hundreds of really dull pages of specifications, but I digress...) The documents are properly typset, indexed, cross linked, hyperlinked, and available in PDF. I'd go insane trying to keep documents that size workable in Word (and probably OOo, for that matter).

      I don't use it for smaller writing, but then I tend to write smaller things in email, or store them in a wiki.

      I understand there is also a FOSS DTP package that isn't based on LaTeX, but I don't recall it's name ATM.

      Rereading your post, I see that you apparently want to allow others to edit the work. My solution doesn't work so well for that. I tend to accept comments and refine based on that. One way I get comments is via Acrobat writers comment facility. I've often wished for (and wondered how to build) such a tool. I just need about 6 months of free time, I'd guess ;)

    2. Re:Does somebody have a GOOD answer to layout? by WillAdams · · Score: 1

      The nicest LaTeX front-end is LyX, http://www.lyx.org/

      The only pdf-editor like things around are drawing programs --- although Enfocus Tailor.app would do pretty much as you wish for PostScript documents, but it's not that accessible given that you need a NeXT or a copy of OPENSTEP to use it. The most reliable way to edit a .pdf is to use the Adobe Acrobat plug-in Enfocus PitStop. Not cheap. Not word-processor like (editing more than a character or two is a study in tediousness).

      Using drawing programs to open up arbitrary .pdfs can be workable, but isn't word-processor-like --- that said, I've done it in the past (one example, book done in a proprietary composition program (Miles 33 for the morbidly curious) which needed reprint corrections --- open up the relevant chapters in FreeHand 8, get _all_ of the pages and formatting (after a few minor tweaks) then re-assemble the text blocks which want editing). These days I'd probably use Cenon for this, http://www.cenon.info/ (not saying it's as good as FH8, but at least it's viable today on decent OSes and being opensource is more likely to improve than FreeHand since its purchase by Adobe)

      As an alternative, opening up a .pdf and directly converting it to .rtf is a useful option and may be more workable for you --- Marcel Weiher's TextLightning.app for Mac OS X (shareware at http://www.metaobject.com/ ) is one of the best programs for this.

      NeoOffice has been workable for me thus far. For a spreadsheet in Mac OS X I've been using Flexisheet from Material Arts (opensource Lotus Improv / Quantrix clone).

      William

      --
      Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
    3. Re:Does somebody have a GOOD answer to layout? by fm6 · · Score: 1
      ...to accurately layout mostly-text documents, send them to novice users, and have them be able to edit the text without everything exploding.
      In theory, XML solves your problems. You control layout with stylesheets, which the novice users don't have access to. They edit text with a simple user-friendly editor, which limits their ability to screw things up.

      The problem is that this is pretty hard to set up. You may have trouble finding an off-the-shelf XML schema that suits your needs, and designing your own is non-trivial. Plus there aren't a lot of good user-friendly editors. I like XMetal, but it only runs on Windows, and I'm sceptical as to its long-term survival.

      Which brings us back to word processors: people are so used to them, they're not terribly interested in learning about (or spending money on) alternatives. Which is why there hasn't been as much development in XML document management as there should be.

    4. Re:Does somebody have a GOOD answer to layout? by fm6 · · Score: 1

      Did you notice the part where he needs to collaborate with naive end-users? Imagine how such a person could mess up a TeX-based document!

  59. Openoffice! by Jozer99 · · Score: 1

    Use open office! It has the amazing security feature of opening so slowly that by the time it loads, there is a new version available that contains any security fixes you might need.

  60. The OS can print anything as PDFs by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Mac OS X can print (printable) files as PDFs natively.

  61. "won't accept something as radically diff as Pages by Herve5 · · Score: 1

    How old are you?
    I am 45 -an age which allows me, paradoxically, to clearly remember times where text editors other than Word existed.
    Not only I accept Pages, but I welcome it.

    Of course it doesn't have *all* the possibilities of Word -no single alternative ever will.
    But, for people like me that need read access to a variety of word-saved documents, and after tests, clearly Pages opens complicated word docs *much better* than the free alternatives.

    I know, it's sad for the open source world. I'll say more: I agree with the general feeling that, once an application's functions are well understood -and 'text processing' is clearly a well understood paradigm now- sooner or later it is to be replaced by open source developments, which is welcome. Even, very welcome in the case of Microsoft.

    But for now, I definitely prefer buying Pages than getting for free applications that at best are (more or less uglily) mimicking Word.

    --
    Herve S.
  62. NeoOffice on OSX 10.2 vs 10.4 by ricky_charlet · · Score: 1

    Here is a small data point, for what it is worth...

    Until last weekend I was running my 533 Mhz G4 tower on osx 10.2 with 128 MB ram. NeoOffice/J was entirely unusable due to slowness (and I can be a pretty patient guy).

    I upgraded to osx 10.4 and 384 MB ram. Now NeoOffice is very usable and only a peg or two short of 'zippy'.

    Both the ram upgrade and the os upgrade contribute to improved perfomance. I'm not sure which is the larger contributing factor. But I would guess it is the Jaguar to Tiger move (Notice how I skipped Panther (10.3) which was well reguarded for improved performance).

  63. Hunting WOMBATs by Kaseijin · · Score: 1
    At the X11 layer, Apple should provide good window management,
    That's the WM layer, but close enough. The only significant difference from native apps is that all X11 windows are grouped together. An 'obvious' improvement would be to create a dock icon per X11 window group, but that would demand an inconsistent menu bar policy.
    clipboard integration
    Already there.
    keycode management
    I don't know what you mean by this, but the X11 keyboard layout can be synchronized to the system layout or set independently with xmodmap.
    printing
    CUPS.
    and a small extension that would let X11 apps access Apple-native features through the X11 protocol.

    One already can hook an X11 app into Carbon and Cocoa pretty much the same way any other app does it: including the headers and calling the functions. Virtually nobody does, because most developers place a high value on either consistency with the platform (i.e., not X11) or consistency across platforms (i.e., not Carbon and Cocoa).

    Getting back to the original point, though, few modern mainstream applications use X11 per se. They use cross-platform, high-level toolkits: GTK, Qt, Swing, wxWidgets, XUL, VCL, etc. It's a lot smarter to integrate platform-specific code once at the toolkit level (again: like so) than to force hundreds or thousands of application developers to duplicate that work (even ignoring the cost to Apple).

    The rest (menu bars, etc.) the Gnome and KDE developers would do if Apple's legal department only would let them.
    Between this comment and your other, I have to conclude that your conception of "look and feel" is only skin deep and that you don't understand the difference between themers illegally redistributing pixmaps and developers building applications (or toolkits) on a platform. Apple hasn't acted against the Aqua ports of wxWidgets or Tk, promotes Qt/Mac for some scenarios, and maintains Java--all of which, especially the latter two, compete with Carbon and Cocoa far more than does X11.
    See, that's one of the problems with Apple's X11 server: it is so big, heavy, and inefficient.
    In other words, it's XFree86, what was then de facto standard desktop implementation. Get back to me after X11R7 stabilizes.
  64. OpenOffice/NeoOffice politics by Kaseijin · · Score: 1
    Is the fact that OpenOffice.org is basically run by Sun likely to be a significant factor here?
    It's a vicious cycle: the second-class treatment of Mac OS within OOo drives away developers, and lack of developers perpetuates that status. The short answer is 'yes, of course', but it's not necessarily sinister or unjustified.
    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 GPL, surely the GPL forbids that? Did they do something weird under Sun's SISSL instead?
    OOo is dual-licensed under SISSL and a mixture of GPL and LGPL. NO/J is straight GPL, which can't be relicensed under SISSL or LGPL. It would be equally accurate to say that OOo's license precludes merging code from NO/J and more precise to say that NO/J could be merged to a GPL fork of OOo, but I was giving the OOo perspective.