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Alternatives To Office For Mac OS X

Posted by Zonk on from the anything-but-clippy dept.

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

3 of 232 comments (clear)

  1. ::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
  2. 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.

  3. 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.