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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."
There is always the possibility that Apple will extend iWork as a replacement for AppleWorks which is a bit long in the tooth now. So thinks the AppleWorks User Group: http://www.awug.org/misc/iwork_iwug.html/
I've been using v.X, and while the functionality is there something down deep isn't quite right. My Powerbook runs hotter if any of the MS apps are running, even in the background, so even idling they're hitting the processor hard. Worse, with Tiger my Powerbook FREQUENTLY gets tied up paging the harddrive, and I'm pretty sure it correlates to whether the MS apps are running or not. In particular Entourage (i.e. Outlook for OS X) is a piece of garbage. Quitting Entourage often seems to clear the carburetors out for me. Again, got much worse with Tiger, so I'm hoping (but not exactly holding my breath) for an update.
Actually, I was trying to be Insightful, not Funny.
I haven't bought the Office suite from Microsoft for close to five years now with the introduction of free alternatives like Open Office.
What originally got me started was the inablity to open an old MS Works file in Office 2003, even with the proper conversion utilities installed. I was able to open the file in OO and make the necessary changes and save it in multiple formats for the future. I have recommended OO for precisely this problem to several friends and many have converted out of sheer spite for breaking compatibitlity between versions of Word.
Although MS Office is fine, I've gotten random crashes lately and the app is sluggish. Maybe it is related to Tiger issues. I have resolved all my font conflicts through FontBook.
I actually have been using TextEdit for quite a lot of writing lately. Once you get the hang of the font menu (customizible though FontBook) and set your preferences, I find it to be a really comfortable solution.
Once my drafts mature (I do a lot of rewriting), I send them over to Office (where I use EndNote), but The simplicity of TextEdit really works for me.
I use Mellel, which is not open source (I don't think), but is shareware. It is pretty sleek looking, runs fast, and I haven't had a problem with it. Customer support is great.
.doc files.
It seems like the main users of Mellel are people needing multilingual support, especially for things like Hebrew (reading the other way) and Japanese, Arabic, etc. It also integrates with some of the bibliography software out there. And I'm pretty damn sure it reads in
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OO.org is quite a bit better on PC (linux, windows) than macs. for whtaever reasons, it just is. there are alot of decent options, like abiword/gnumeric or KOffice (if you can like X11 and fink...) but in the whole industry there's just not much of a market for office suites. it's office or office. usually 97 versus 2000 versus XP. hopefully OO.org 2.0 will do for it what moz has done for the browser wars.
.doc's. anyways, i rarely use it in my classroom. honestly. i use keynote and abiword, as my WP needs are small. also, for alot of things I just go the html route. but that's me. anyways, office is by far the best bet on the mac. since OO.org has kinda dropped OSX from its priority OS's, don't expect much improvement in the mac situation. apple could, i imagine, have put money into OO.org, or some other suite, or developed one in house, but they really need a top tier MSOFfice, and pissing off ms ain't gonna be helpful. really, apple sales are probably 1% of microsoft's business. it isn't gonna cause billy g to lose sleep the way linux does.
i installed office X on my ibook because I had to for grad school. damn profs always wanting
apple needs office more than MS needs apple.
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
I also found that my 12" PowerBook seemed to be paging the hard drive more with Tiger, so I maxed-out the RAM on it (1.12GB) and it's now much better.
Watch the RAM in Activity Monitor. If it looks like all of your RAM is being used, I'd suggest getting more before you have to replace your hard drive because it burned out.
Spotlight's indexing processes are also a *major* culprit in Tiger's slowdowns and lockups. I'm at the end of my tether with those, which is really sad as I love Spotlight and use it all the time.
Tiger's also more of a memory hog than Panther, sadly, so performance is going to suffer more often in Tiger simply due to memory exhaustion.
If 10.4.2 doesn't fix at least the Spotlight issues I'm going to start losing my good feelings towards Apple. Bah humbug.
I have said this before and I will keep saying it: Apple's greatest problem at the moment is the lack of an affordable full office suite ($400 is not affordable -- note you can almost buy a Mac Mini for that). People won't accept something as radically different as Pages. NeoOffice/J is the best hope they have. I can understand that Apple doesn't want to come out publicly in support of the project, because Microsoft could cut them off at the knees, and Apple is dependent on MS Office. But I hope to hell that Jobs has some people squirreled away in Infinity Drive somewhere working on this.
Office suites are big, complicated pieces of software, sort of like operating systems and browsers. Apple should do what they did with OS X (BSD/Darwin) and Safarai (Konqueror, KHTML) and use NeoOffice/J as the basis for their own suite. This Pages stuff can only be a stop-gap measure.
I have been using my first mac (powerbook) for almost a month now, and i can say that NeoOffice/J does a much better job for a user in mac os x than the X11 version of OpenOffice.
That's Apple's fault: they are putting roadblocks in the way of people trying to do a better job with X11 integration on Macintosh. The OOo developers got so annoyed with Apple's behavior that they stopped working on Macintosh integration.
There is no technical reason why X11 couldn't be as smoothly integrated into OS X as Carbon and Cocoa are: X11 should be preinstalled and run automatically on every Macintosh, and its window management should be tightly integrated with the Macintosh desktop.
The fact that it isn't (and that X11 is dog slow on Macintosh) is Apple politics: Apple doesn't want X11 to run too well on Macintosh--they probably are afraid that if X11 becomes well enough integrated so that people can write applications with a native L&F, it would become the predominant API on OS X. To prevent that, Apple wants X11 to run just well enough so that people can use workstation applications on Macintosh if they have to, but so that X11 applications continue to look foreign and don't integrate very well.
The only times my OSX machine has ever crashed have been due to ms apps, word, excel and "remote desktop connection".. When i don't run any of those apps, the machine remains up for months on end..
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http://www.abisource.com/
/. discussion anyway. If you're going to do serious spreadsheet work, for example. you *will* need Excel -- it's actually really not that bad.
Completely free and open, and using native widgets and updated constantly. Granted, it's only a word processor, but that's all I've noticed being talked about in this
-o
At my work we have a site license for Office.X so I've been able to compare Office and Neo side by side without $$ being part of the equation. My use of both consists or writing technical software manuals. These documents require the use of Table Of Contents, Index, Cross-references, screen shots with captions, and are generally in the ball park of 100 pages long. Office.X simply isn't up to the task. Maybe the PC version of Office is better, it has to be or no one would use it. Office simply can not remember formatting, styles, tables, lists, graphic positions and it often corrupts the document I am working on. NeoOffice/J is rock solid in all these areas. I have never gotten a corrupt document. It remembers things like lists, tables, graphics positions, formatting, etc... Having a Mac, I have not had a chance to play with OpenOffice 2.x, but let me say this. If OpenOffice adds support for advanced scripting (via something better than VBS, say Ruby, Python, Perl...) Microsoft will have their ass handed to them.
Unlike Java, X11 doesn't have a standard high-level graphical framework, so there's no way Apple can provide generic "X11" integration
At the X11 layer, Apple should provide good window management, clipboard integration, keycode management, printing, and a small extension that would let X11 apps access Apple-native features through the X11 protocol. The rest (menu bars, etc.) the Gnome and KDE developers would do if Apple's legal department only would let them.
If I wanted X11 to load when I log in, I'd put it in my login items.
See, that's one of the problems with Apple's X11 server: it is so big, heavy, and inefficient. The X11 protocol is simple; a good implementation of it as part of the OS X GUI would probably be more lightweight than the menu bar clock.
I know the Cube is way faster, but it reminds me of an iBook, 300mhz G3, I recently fixed. NeoOffice takes about 90 seconds to load on that old beast with inadequate memory. Truth is, it barely functions. AbiWord loads up in under 20 seconds and is quite responsive. It's almost perfect but has a serious flaw that ruins everything -- a the toolbar "floats" rather than appears in the doucument's window. The title bar is initially loaded under the menu bar, which is fine. Unfortunately, it gets hidden by open documents and requires a manual resize of the document window. Granted, the old iBooks were pretty low res, but that certainly keeps AbiWord out of the running for my powerbook.
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Don't want to sound offending, but it seems you never have explored the opportunities of word processors:
I had done a lot of work on the document to get clean line/paragraph/page breaks. For example, to prevent the last line of a page being the first line of a paragraph, I would insert a page break.
This problem is called "orphans and widows". OOo is quite good in handling it. MS Word isn't. So Word is your real problem. If Word was properly worked on, you wouldn't have to insert a page break. But you could at least try to use the "prevent orphans and widows" features in Word, OOo, and Neo.
I think it is common to care about precise page breaks, etc., and therefore I think a "compatible" program should obey these, at the very least. Otherwise it's impossible to actually use the document. Mail it to someone and ask a question about page 8, and they will have a different page 8. [...] PS. please, let's not get into the matter of one version of MSOffice being incompatible with another. That's true but irrelevant since the granting agency to which I am sending the document has a compatible version, as do my colleagues with whom I am working on the project.
The problem with losing formatting isn't unique to different versions of Word. It can easily happen if both sides have the same version. All it takes is a different default printer since MS Office receives the metrics from the printer. OOo's layout is printer independent. Moreover, MS Word sometimes loses formatting on the same machine. Just save your doc and reopen it. Sometimes, very strange things happen to your documents in Word. And you if need to be absolutely sure about layout, use PDF. That's the way to (and PDF export is an OOo/Neo feature).
Word's capabilities are absolutely inadequate for professional use, and the only reason for using it is the secret file format. If professional writers were serious about their profession, they would avoid this crap by all means