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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."
-- If something bad happens, it still usually manages to stop, save the file to disk, then dump its core. Amazing. --
"Dump its core"?? "Bad happens"?? "Manages to Stop"??
Thats hell of an usage i can tell you, and this is very flawed product indeed. Another open-source garbage. Expect to be hacked soon dude, due to open-source base that really means open-possiblilities-for-hack.
I presume that, ehm, "LaTeX", you deem is high-end page layout program (?). No its NOT, wake up from your dreams, get life, try build something ppl will pay you for and stop draining my tax money!!!
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.
Cheers,
Ehttp://eugeneciurana.com | http://ciurana.eu
OOo for Mac require X11, looks like crap, acts like crap, and can't properly size a window to save its life.
Yes, and you know why that is? Because Apple's X11 server works like crap: it's dog slow, doesn't integrate well with the desktop, and isn't even started up automatically when needed.
And why does X11 on OS X work like crap? Because Apple has no interest in fixing it: their goal is to tie developers to their proprietary window system, and they are going to do whatever it takes to achieve that.
OOo is up to the task, the problem is Apple and their X11 server. And rather than being Apple's patsy and porting every open source application to Apple's proprietary platform, people should stop investing time in open source for Macintosh until Apple properly supports X11.
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.
Excel is useless for serious business calculations, it has many known bugs which often result in formulae being calculated incorrectly, and often people will just assume it's correct and accept it..
Making your business dependant on something which can't work out basic math is an incredibly stupid thing to do.. I wonder how much money companies lose every year because of calculation errors in excel..
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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.