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

[corporatemutantninja]

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.

Re:Both options are great

[elbobo]

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.

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.

Apple extending iWork?

[Anonymous Coward]

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/

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:Why does Apple need office, anyways?

[Graymalkin]

AppleWorks is a nice suite if all you need to do is work with files you've created and work with and only need rudimentary Word and Excel support. When you start needing more advanced features that Office has AppleWorks begins to look extremely basic.

Two excellent examples of this are change tracking and comments. There's no comparable feature in AppleWorks for these. In networked environments these features of Office are seeing more and more use. If several users all edit the same document at different times being able to track the changes made to said document is extremely important. This couples well with the ability to make out of channel comments about the document that travel with it.

If you're trying to switch a business and their existing document base over from Windows PCs to Macs you're going to need software with not just good but excellent Office compatibility. You can't replace a tool with a new one that does half as much as the old.

OO.org Vs Neo

[siplus]

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.

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)

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.

Re:Open Office

[AKAImBatman]

FYI, I think the moderators marked you "flamebait" because you weren't paying attention. OOo for Mac require X11, looks like crap, acts like crap, and can't properly size a window to save its life. This spurred the invention of NeoOffice/J, which is OpenOffice, but using Java to fill in a few holes (such as the GUI). It does not require X11, it's reasonably snappy, holds up quite well, and has most (all?) of the features of the latest 1.x release of OpenOffice.

though excel really is the best spreadsheet software that I have yet seen on any platform.

That is the oddest thing to saY. IMHO, most spreadsheets are alike and interoperate quite well. It's the word processing documents that are the killer.

Microsoft has to hate this...

[Hamster Lover]

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.

Re:Microsoft has to hate this...

[jschoenberg]

The word processing that was in Works is not the same as Microsoft Word. They didn't break any sort of compatibility between versions.

Most people in this thread who want basic word processing should be comparing the various Mac word processing software to Works, not MS Word. MS Word has way more integrated enterprise and work-group features than a regular consumer will ever want to take advantage of. Most people who migrate away from Word to OO or others just want a word processor, not a collaboration tool, so they shouldn't be buying MS Office in the first place, they should buy Works, or...better yet....download Open Office or other free word processors.

Comparing any of those basic tools to Office just doesn't make sense. Apples and oranges.

TextEdit

[pbooktebo]

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.

Apple's fault (for making NeoOffice/J possible)

[Kaseijin]

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.... There is no technical reason why X11 couldn't be as smoothly integrated into OS X as Carbon and Cocoa are....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.

What you mean is that Apple isn't doing with X11 what is has with Java, which is to devote significant effort to get to the point where the simplest apps can pass for native and the rest feel like poor imitations. Unlike Java, X11 doesn't have a standard high-level graphical framework, so there's no way Apple can provide generic "X11" integration. They'd need to provide their own APIs, and toolkit developers would have to use them... oh, wait.

The OOo developers got so annoyed with Apple's behavior that they stopped working on Macintosh integration.

The OOo developers stopped working on Mac integration because it wasn't a priority for them, the NO/J developers were doing a better job of it, and NO/J's license precludes merging code from NO/J into OOo.

X11 should... run automatically on every Macintosh

This reminds me of a story, only in reverse. If I wanted X11 to load when I log in, I'd put it in my login items. I don't, because waiting longer for a usable desktop just to hide startup time for applications I may not even use wouldn't do me any good.