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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."

18 of 232 comments (clear)

  1. 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 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.
    3. 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.
    4. 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!
  2. Um by mcc · · Score: 5, Informative

    What do you mean?

    --
    Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
    1. 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.

  3. 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.

    --
    Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
    1. 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.

    2. 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.

  4. 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.

  5. 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.

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

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

  7. 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.

  8. 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".

  9. 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.

  10. 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. ;)

  11. 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.