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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."
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.
What do you mean?
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
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.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
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.
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.
none of these offer complete exchange integration, so any office that runs exchange wont really benefit
Currently I use LaTeX for documents and Lilypond for music.
...can correctly open an MS Word document with two tables. :-)
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.
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".
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.
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. ;)
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.
"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.)