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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.
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.