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."

Comments

NeoOffice/J

[LochNess]

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.

Re:NeoOffice/J

[Soko]

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

Re:NeoOffice/J

[binford2k]

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.

Um

[mcc]

What do you mean?

Re:Um

[Senjutsu]

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.

Both options are great

[AKAImBatman]

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.

Re:Both options are great

[64nDh1]

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.

Why does Apple need office, anyways?

[ChllaPk]

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.

Re:Apple Office

[LochNess]

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.