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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?
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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.
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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 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.
Since Neo is based on OpenOffice, and I am familiar with it from my use of Linux and Windows, Neo is simply the best choice!
The only bad part; There won't be an implementation of a native version of OpenOffice 2.0 for awhile.
I'm not sure if this is because of my experience in high school, but i like the simplistic layout of MS word more than OOo 1.1 writer. I prefer the OOo 1.9 writer and 1.9 presentation layout; but don't see these coming to the Mac very soon (outside of the X11 implementation)
What is the status of OO.org on the mac platform? I have heard that the interface is not consistent with other OSX applications. But other than that, what is the stability, speed and usability like? I personally very much enjoy OO.org on Windows, though excel really is the best spreadsheet software that I have yet seen on any platform.
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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.
Well, that's an improvement, I guess. I'm a poor college student; I use Linux because I couldn't afford another Windows license when it last crashed completely, so I'll just go out and blow $700 on InDesign. No problem. I didn't really need to pay bills or rent. Or eat.
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.
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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"Most [options] seem to be open source, which is good for the programming community and better for the Apple user."
I can more or less see the first one... but better for the Apple user how, exactly? Does it do the job the user wants better than the closed-source option? Most reasonable people would say "no" - the job, like it or not, is to work seamlessly and transparently with MS Office. At (theoretical) best it can do this job "as good as" Office, but if you've used OpenOffice on any significant MS Office document you know that isn't the case right now.
You may feel that "open source" is a laudable goal in and of itself. I won't disagree with you, but I doubt that most users will ever really care.
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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 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.
No flame intended, but I think NeoOffice/J is utter crap. Functionality is great (if one thinks duplicating MS features and functionalities is the way to go; personally I am horrified to find the preferences in the "tools" menu, amongst 100 other usability flaws) but the user interface just is an exact copy of the Windows 95 UI. My eyes hurt when using NeoOffice/J. This just does not give me the user experience I expect as a Mac user. This combines a Windows UI with Windows usabilty. I'm not a Windows user you know, I don't want this. But I appreciate the work, and see the importance of alternatives for MS Office. NeoOffice/J is just not there yet, and I'm hoping someone can someday create an Office suite that offers more than being just an MS Office duplicate with an ugly UI.
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".
If I was still a student - yes - free is MUCH better than $100. Let's see - no income, having to live off savings and possibly temporary jobs during the vacation and still sinking into debt - that $100 is needed for food and beer, thanks.
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I bought it in my windows days when Sun Java for Win32 started to rock, now on OS X, I still use it and thanks to java maybe, its one of the rare programs did not need a update etc to run on tiger.
.doc file, I knew what was coming but thank god it worked.
;) You know what I mean. Besides jokes, they now have a huge Korean company at their back, Haansoft. I wish they try "webtop" type office again some day.
It plain works.
Version 3 comes in weeks, http://www.thinkfree.com/
It passed very evil tests here, like editing a very bad formatted pro movie script. When I saw the 450 kb
Another problem with them would be? er, whitelist thinkfree if you buy/trial it. They are now Korean company
First days of Thinkfree, you could run it from IE, using JVM 1.1. No wonder we must be impressed.
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/. 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.
If Apple did this, there is a chance that Microsoft would stop making MS Office for OS X, and for many users this would make OS X no longer an option.
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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.
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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