NeoOffice 2.2.1 Available For Mac

VValdo writes "Following a month or so of their Early Access Program, NeoOffice, the free Office suite for OS X, has just released NeoOffice 2.2.1. New features include support for the native Mac OS X spell-checker and address book; support for high-resolution printing (more than the 300 dpi that previous versions allowed); the ability to open, edit, and save most Microsoft Office 2007 Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents; and the latest features from OpenOffice.org 2.2.1, which is the code base for NeoOffice. X11 is not required, but for those of you who actually want to use X11, check out the new RetroOffice."

Comments

Say what?

[Anonymous Coward]

...for those of you who actually want to use X11...

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!

too little, too late?

[larry bagina]

Like many other Macintosh users, I downloaded the iWorks '08 trial and promptly purchased it. I've used OpenOffice/NeoOffice (on Linux and Mac OS). iWork looks, feels, and behaves like a native program. *Office doesn't.

Re:too little, too late?

[c_forq]

While I like iWork (especially Numbers) as a word processor I find it lacking. For layout it is easily the best program I have ever used, but for writing a research paper I would rather use Microsoft Word. Last time I did a research paper on Open Office it severely screwed up my footnotes (which on a 50 page document with 1-6 footnotes per page is kind of a big deal). Unfortunately Microsoft Office 2004 seems slow on my MacBook (I'm told this is due to it being a non-universal application and running through Rosetta) so I am still looking forward for Microsoft Office 2008. I still have high hopes for iWork to continue to progress, Apple seems to be very good at looking at what people are doing and want to do with programs, and have seemed to always put effort into serving students in higher education.

Re:too little, too late?

[Anonymous Coward]

If Apple wanted to do anything other than vendor lock-in with iWorks, they would have just contributed to OpenOffice instead.

Re:too little, too late?

[Arghdee]

Like many other Macintosh users, I downloaded the iWorks '08 trial and promptly purchased it. I've used OpenOffice/NeoOffice (on Linux and Mac OS). iWork looks, feels, and behaves like a native program. *Office doesn't.

I was going to post this myself. Thanks for saving me the effort :)

Re:too little, too late?

[Bluesman]

Use LaTeX for research papers. Thank me later.

Re:too little, too late?

[c_forq]

I tried to start using LaTeX when my primary computer was a Ubuntu desktop, but never really got it it figured out. Could you recommend an easy to use OS-X LaTeX editor with a nice tutorial?

Re:too little, too late?

[Jeff DeMaagd]

I keep both iWork (06) and NeoOffice. I gave OpenOffice the boot because it required X11. I'll give iWork '08 a shot eventually, but I'm trying to avoid spending money for the moment. It's cheap enough, but then, it's something I don't have to have right now.

Re:too little, too late?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe when (hopefully) Apple decides to support ODF. Supporting Microsoft's (using the term loosely) standard is great, but I'd like more options.

Re:too little, too late?

[linguae]

Like many other Macintosh users, I downloaded the iWorks '08 trial and promptly purchased it. I've used OpenOffice/NeoOffice (on Linux and Mac OS). iWork looks, feels, and behaves like a native program. *Office doesn't.

After purchasing my MacBook last year (I was previously a Windows and *nix user, now my Mac is my sole computer), I tried (and eventually purchased iWork 06. I love Keynote (I bought it solely for Keynote, in fact) and believe that Keynote > PowerPoint > OO Impress, but I'm just not really into Pages no matter how many times I've used it. I like the concepts of styles and use LaTeX for all of my non-MLA papers, but whenever writing any other type of document, I prefer the more "free" structure of Word/OO Writer/AbiWord/etc. to Pages's strict enforcement of styles. My biggest problem with iWork (don't know about iWork 2008, however) is its very imperfect compatibility with MS Office file formats. The basics are correct, but anything that requires tables, exact layout, more complex styles, etc. starts to look jarbled. So, I like iWork a lot (much speedier than MS Office 2004 due to my having an Intel Mac, not to mention cheaper [$49 vs $149 for students]), but for perfect compatibility, I don't trust it.

I've also tried NeoOffice on my machine. As stated earlier, I vastly prefer Writer to Pages. NeoOffice was a necessity to me because of its spreadsheet (iWork 06 doesn't have a spreadsheet; that changed with iWork 08; I still need to try it). NeoOffice's compatibility with MS Office documents is superb, and I use NeoOffice to open and save documents where compatibility is very important. However, my complaint with NeoOffice is its speed (it is dog slow on my 1.83GHz Core Duo MacBook with 512MB RAM, but I plan on upgrading to 2GB). The fact that the widgets are non-native and fake-looking do not add to the problem, either.

Personally, I'm waiting for MS Office 2008 to come out (finally a native version for Intel Macs). However, if iWork 08 is a major improvement with compatibility, or if NeoOffice makes big improvements with speed and its interface, then I might not have to shell out the cash.

Re:too little, too late?

[Just Some Guy]

I'd gladly buy it if it supported ODF. But if I'm going with something other than MS Office, it's at least going to use open standards that the rest of the world is migrating to. Seriously, the iWorks formats have all the lock-in of Office but none of the ubiquity. What's the point in that?

Re:too little, too late?

[Anonymous Coward]

TeXShop. I swore by it (when at university). Uses Quartz and PDFTex to render directly to PDF -- DVI + PS not necessary. Oh and did I mention that it uses the Mac UI and Quartz. Yeah.

Re:too little, too late?

[shking]

Go to either MacUpdate or Version Tracker for Mac software with user ratings and reviews

Re:too little, too late?

[JoeCommodore]

Problem with iWork is the same AppleWorks has, it is not entirely exportable or cross platform. I really like AppleWorks but now it's discontinued and no avenue to convert DBs and drawings (two of the best parts of AW BTW)

I had been looking for something a bit less of an eventual dead end. OpenOffice/NeoOffice certainly has similar features - OO Draw is superb (but they need to fix tiling on printout), and the DB looks even more capable than ApplWorks DB. Not only that it works on Macs, Windows and Linux and I can readily provide people with the app if they don't have it. Pretty much a win all the way around to me.

I will say iWork has the glitz (PowerPoint and Impress are way behind in animation compared to Keynote - hey, GL guys, where are you???) but that's the only iWork feature I see compelling but then again, in my career, I've probably only created about six PowerPoints.

Re:too little, too late?

[Anonymous Coward]

And Linus should have just released patches for minix? Sorry, but sometimes you have to admit that a turd is a turd and start over.

Re:too little, too late?

[linguae]

I use TeXShop for all of my LaTeX needs. It's not just a LaTeX editor, but also contains an easy-to-use environment to create PDFs on the fly. It is also bundled with a graphical BiBTeX editor to store bibliographies. Way better than the command-line tools that I've used on my old FreeBSD machine :).

As for LaTeX tutorials, I use "The Not So Short Introduction to LaTeX 2E." It's a very good tutorial that will get you started working with LaTeX code. I use LaTeX for all of my research papers except for those that employ the MLA format (LaTeX was designed for scientists and mathematicians, not keeping English and history majors in mind. But sometimes a science/math student needs to write an English paper, and I haven't been satisfied with existing MLA themes for LaTeX). If you must use MLA, just stick with Word.

Re:too little, too late?

[zefram cochrane]

Texmaker is a nice multi-platform LaTeX editor that uses templates. Another option would be TeXShop. As for a good tutorial, the not-so-short guide to LaTeX is a great way to go. Long-short guide LaTeX is simply the best tool for working with research papers and the like with structured formatting and bibliographical information use BibTeX.

Re:too little, too late?

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree completely. With the addition of Numbers (no pun intended) in iWork '08, Apple has put together a pretty comprehensive and functional office suite that truly gives the user a Mac experience. There's nothing in MS Office or OO.o that I need that can't be accomplished in iWork.

I've used OpenOffice under X11 on the Mac and it feels bloated and clumsy. Office X for Mac is counterintuitive, typical for a Microsoft product. I've even used NeoOffice and its Java framework really brings my Mac to a crawl. I happily paid $80 for iWork and I wonder how Microsoft is going to justify $500 for Office:mac '08. Even free products like OO.o or NeoOffice might have a hard time competing with Apple's iWork because of its perceived value.

Re:too little, too late?

[gardyloo]

I've used LyX (used it for my doctoral thesis) almost exclusively as a LaTeX editor. I highly recommend it for just about anyone (it's available for OS X, Windows, and, of course, linux). It comes with its own tutorial.
http://www.lyx.org/

Re:too little, too late?

[mspohr]

I had the opposite experience with my wife's Master's thesis. This had very strict requirements for formatting and MS Word kept doing very strange things with margins and footnotes. It would insert odd spacing and pagination and it was just impossible to get it right. Some of the pages were just grossly wrong and couldn't be fixed.

Finally, I opened the document in OpenOffice and was able to easily fix all of the problems with margins and footnotes and I printed the final copies from OpenOffice. It would have saved me a lot of time to have started the project in OpenOffice.

Re:too little, too late?

[nightcats]

Agreed: longtime Mac users will like iWork 08. Keynote alone is worth the $80. You can now do voiceover shows and export to Quicktime without separate audio and video files (my major complaint with the previous versions). Numbers is actually a very good version 1, and Pages is marginally improved as a word processor, and still excellent as a page layout editor. All depends on how you use these types of applications: if you're a Mac user, then graphical quality and accurate, speedy file conversions matter, because that's what you expect. That said, I still use OO in X11 and have very few and minor complaints with it. Faster than MS Office for Mac, safer, and more reliable. What I don't understand is how OO and NeoOffice can get universal binary versions together so quickly while MS will have us waiting till next year. Maybe it's true what one of my geek buddies says about open source: "None of us is as smart as all of us."

Re:too little, too late?

[sloanster]

Oh, I dunno, I'm always open to useful tools. A bit of fanboi dramatics isn't enough to deter me.

Just out of curiosity, does iworks grok ODF? There's also the price point, but either way I intend to check them both out on my macbook and see which gives me more bang for the buck.

Re:too little, too late?

[Swampash]

I love Keynote ... but I'm just not really into Pages no matter how many times I've used it.

I think Pages has been and is misrepresented as a word processor. It's really a page-design and layout tool. Rather than "Apple's word processor" I think of it as "Indesign lite".

Keynote, of course, stomps Powerpoint in almost every possible way.

Re:too little, too late?

[omeomi]

I just had to laugh when I heard you did your "research" papers in Microsoft Word. Not even Microsoft Research does that.

Yeah, because only math and engineering students do research...do you honestly think the average medical student (for instance) is using LaTeX for their research papers?

Re:too little, too late?

[Trogre]

BlueSky TeXtures is a lovely TeX IDE. Only problem is that they're still stuck in OS9 so you need to run it in classic mode. Though an OSX release will be out Any Day Now(tm).

Re:too little, too late?

[Just Some Guy]

How is that a troll? I don't want proprietary formats, and I just don't see the logic in creating new ones when ODF pretty much has word processing covered. If I were OK with proprietary formats, I'd chose the one that 95% of the population uses, not one that will only let me interact with a small subset of users of a still relatively little-used OS. I have a Mac and I wouldn't hesitate to buy iWork if it didn't mean being locked in yet again.

Re:too little, too late?

[nacturation]

Use LaTeX for research papers. Thank me later. Interestingly enough, I just ran into a program called OcTeX which looking for a movie trailer on the Apple site. I haven't used it, but thought it relevant... and it's freeware.

Re:too little, too late?

[mrchaotica]

...do you honestly think the average medical student (for instance) is using LaTeX for their research papers?

No, but they should be.

Re:too little, too late?

[gutter]

Seriously, the iWorks formats have all the lock-in of Office but none of the ubiquity.

The huge difference between the iWorks formats and Office formats is that the iWorks formats are sane and well documented XML:

http://developer.apple.com/documentation/AppleAppl ications/Conceptual/iWork2-0_XML/Chapter02/chapter _2_section_4.html

So, while it's true that iWorks is the only real option for editing them now, it shouldn't be too hard to convert them in the future - you can probably get them into ODF with some simple scripts, or potentially even simple XSL transforms.

Re:too little, too late?

[Anonymous Coward]

I wish it were so. I use Lyx and it's great as long as you stick to their styles. However, if you want it to do MLA, you're out of luck. There is only partial hackish MLA support for LaTex. It's really a shame because it absolutely rocks for scientific styles.

Re:too little, too late?

[gutter]

Nope, it doesn't read or write it unfortunately - I just tried. Since they're both XML, I wonder how hard it would be to write a converter?

Re:too little, too late?

[NMerriam]

Problem with iWork is the same AppleWorks has, it is not entirely exportable or cross platform. I really like AppleWorks but now it's discontinued and no avenue to convert DBs and drawings (two of the best parts of AW BTW)

With the slight difference that iWork's file formats are specified, openly available, and all the component files are stored in open, native formats rather than locked up in mysterious BLOBs.

iWork is perfectly safe to store things in, at least in the sense of being able to get things back out in the future.

Re:too little, too late?

[Pecisk]

iWorks has serious limitations and even Apple doesn't market it as full fledged office suite suited for Enterprise or SMB use. However, I agree in in it's own merits (aka small suite) it rocks and looks seriously cool, specially Keynote.

However, as many of people who use OO.o all the time in other OSes, I need ODF support. Apple is in bed with Microsoft in this one (even supporting Microsoft ego driven ISO screwing), so sorry Jobs, not this time. And all my supported Mac boxes (both PowerPC and Intel ones) has rockin solid NeoOffice 2.1 release, which finally fixed bunch of things which was blocking serious production use.

Re:too little, too late?

[Bluesman]

I used LyX for a while, and it's great, but completely unnecessary. LaTeX is simple enough that you could learn most of what you need in a few hours, from tutorials you can find on the web, and then use your favorite text editor. (I like emacs in viper mode.)

If you can write HTML, you can write LaTeX. They're essentially the same idea, only LaTeX is much more complete with nicer output.

Re:too little, too late?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like a Microsoft Publisher competitor.

Re:too little, too late?

[tsa]

Can iWorks handle ODF? Of so I might be tempted to switch from OpenOffice. I'm a bit sick of not being able to read my old files after switching office suits.

Re:too little, too late?

[MojoStan]

I think Pages has been and is misrepresented as a word processor. It's really a page-design and layout tool. Rather than "Apple's word processor" I think of it as "Indesign lite".

I've read this (that Pages is not a word processor) in articles and on Slashdot. However, Apple still categorizes (misrepresents?) Pages as a "word processor":

• "Writing comes naturally when you're using Pages '08, the streamlined word processor for the Mac." --iWork Overview
• "Word processing never looked this good." --Pages Product Info

Re:too little, too late?

[tsa]

Oops that must be suites, not suits. :)

Re:too little, too late?

[tsa]

It was a troll because you said something negative about Apple. Welcome to /. where moderators run wild.

Re:too little, too late?

[tsa]

And please mod me down because my question has already been discussed here.

Re:too little, too late?

[sakusha]

I saw your message and realized I hadn't taken Pages for a spin yet. It reminds me of the old MacWrite, a simple basic word processor that gets the Mac UI. I liked it.

Re:too little, too late?

[Yggdrasil42]

That's not gonna work. The OP said he was using a Macbook. OS 9 Classic mode is not available on Intel Macs.

Re:too little, too late?

[vonFinkelstien]

I use LaTeX on my Mac for everything I hand out to my students. I'm an English teacher in Sweden. I've even typeset several books with LaTeX.

Re:too little, too late?

[vonFinkelstien]

It's a pity that there aren't any good MLA packages out there for LaTeX.

Re:too little, too late?

[LKM]

I don't think Apple wants to compete with the whole of Office. They want to compete for the people who use Office, but don't really need it and would be happier with a simpler, more graphics-oriented solution.

Re:too little, too late?

[physicsnick]

For a good LaTeX tutorial, I highly recommend A Beginner's Guide to LaTeX. It's a tremendous guide which is very useful both for learning LaTeX and as a reference. It's what I used to learn LaTeX, and I continued to use the guide as a reference throughout university in everything I wrote from essays to lab reports to research papers. Once you've got LaTeX and an IDE installed, hop into Chapter 2 and start reading.

Re:too little, too late?

[Anonymous Coward]

\begin{flamebait}
Your average medical student doesn't need to write equations... to them, equations are HOLY THINGS which no one should ever handle. Once an equation is established it is like a HOLY TRUTH.

All the mathematics they will ever need in their papers are the (holy) p values (which has to be less than 0.05 --- a threshold which gives their results the status of HOLY TRUTH).
\end{flamebait}

Post anonymous to continue to get medical treatments...

Re:too little, too late?

[danhuby]

I second this. I've used both OpenOffice and NeoOffice on my Mac, and while I commend the efforts to produce an open source office suite, they both have a long way to go to match the performance, ease of use and superb interface in iWorks '08 (which was well worth the money).

Re:too little, too late?

[teh kurisu]

I've downloaded the trial as well, and I'm considering buying it as an upgrade to iWork 05 which I have at the moment. Pages seems to have improved drastically in terms of usability since then, and with Numbers I now have no real reason to open NeoOffice at all.

I think all the iWork/OpenOffice/LaTeX arguments (and occasional fanboyism) are a bit beside the point, because they're all going after different markets. iWork is perfectly acceptable for writing documentation for internal company use, which is what I'm using it for at the moment. I find the control over page layout that I have quite useful, as it helps with readability. If I ever wanted to do a mail merge, or some collaborative work, I'd use MS Office or OpenOffice, depending on my audience. If I was writing a major report, I'd use LaTeX.

A few people have mentioned that Pages doesn't cut it as a word processor. But why would Apple write a MS Word clone? MS Office and Open/NeoOffice are already available for OS X. What they've done is write something for those people that think MS Word and OO.o Writer are overkill. An alternative rather than a clone.

Re:too little, too late?

[shmlco]

"Maybe it's true what one of my geek buddies says about open source: "None of us is as smart as all of us.""

As long as we're spouting homilies, how about "too many cooks spoil the broth?" Or any of several dozen about anything designed by a committee?

Re:too little, too late?

[gatzke]

Or use LyX as a front end to LaTeX. A little closer to WYSIWYG with GUIs for most everything.

LaTeX is amazing, but hacking a plain text file is a bit rough for 95% of the people out there. There are a number of editors out there, but LyX is the one I have used for years. Free, and .lyx files are plain text (like .tex files). Why are people still using binary formats for documents?

Re:too little, too late?

[Alioth]

I've just tried this new version of NeoOffice and it's a huge improvement in consistency with Mac OS X over older versions - it does look and feel native now, at least in the cases I've been able to try so far. It's also a lot faster to load and run on my PowerBook G4 than older versions.

Re:too little, too late?

[TheRaven64]

A few others have recommended TeXShop. I used that for a while, and then went back to Vim; when you're dealing with a lot of text, powerful macro facilities are incredibly important. OS X currently ships with an ancient version of Vim, but the new one compiles and works fine (and comes with nice things like spell checking. I use a custom Makefile to build it.

I'd thoroughly recommend the Not So ShortIntroduction to LaTeX. That's the only thing I read about LaTeX before writing my undergraduate dissertation with it. If you've got a problem it doesn't explain, then google ctan.org, and there's probably a package that solves it already (which may well be in your TeX distribution already).

Don't forget that TeX is a full programming language, and LaTeX is a set of macros built on top of this for semantic markup. The important thing while writing is to keep the semantics clear. Do this by defining marcos for new semantics you wish to capture, rather than falling back to syntactic markup. For example, I use a \keyword macro that makes the arguments italic and adds them to the index and a \code macro that syntax highlights short code snippets inline.

Since learning LaTeX, I've written an undergraduate dissertation, a PhD thesis, and a book using it, and I can't imagine going back to something like OpenOffice for any nontrivial documents.

Re:too little, too late?

[Macka]

iWork 08 is my first choice now too. But realistically there are some things its apps can't do or don't handle too well (yet). And if you want to share spreadsheets from Numbers you have to export to Excel and then edit again to get rid of the default Table of Contents sheet Apple add, and sort out the sheet renaming that Numbers gives you no control over. You need either MS Office or NeoOffice for that. NeoOffice can also handle much bigger spreadsheets than Numbers (today).

So as good as iWork 08 is, you still need a second set of tools for many situations. And NeoOffice is free, unless you want to donate (and they do deserve it). So it's worth while having on your system for those situations where you need to share with MS users.

Apple: If a sheet only contains one table, why rename it? And if all the sheets only have one table, then why add a Table of Contents? It makes no sense.

Re:too little, too late?

[Bootle]

Where, pray tell, was your WIFE during all of this?

Re:too little, too late?

[DrXym]

Impress has one feature which made it invaluable to me recently - export to PDF. I had to scanned some legal documents and send them to someone. Since I don't have Adobe Acrobat to compose the pages, I was at a loss how to do it. I had the pages as .png images but it was huge pain to use Write and I gave up trying. But then I found I could add them as as slides to a blank Impress presentation and then reorder them. Once they were in the proper order I just exported them as PDF. Easy peasy.

Re:too little, too late?

[TheRaven64]

I agree. I would only recommend iWork for write-once documents. Keynote is ideal for me, since presentations I write tend not to need editing in the future, and either get exported as PDF or thrown away after delivering them. If I needed any kind of guarantee of future availability of my documents in an editable form, I would not use Keynote, and I don't use Pages.

Re:too little, too late?

[MMC Monster]

Making dinner.

Re:too little, too late?

[Dan_Bercell]

Why use an open format when as you say 95% of the population uses a product that doesnt.

Re:too little, too late?

[mspohr]

My wife wrote the paper (English literature)... I just did the formatting (and I also make dinner).

Re:too little, too late?

[hahiss]

There's a solid collection of Mac+LaTeX info (including software, getting started, etc.) at:

http://www.esm.psu.edu/mac-tex/

I've not used OS X in years, really, but when I did I used TeXShop as my LaTeX front end and i-installer (which seems to be no more) for installing LaTeX itself. The i-installer page is still there, and there's some TeX info there:

http://ii2.sourceforge.net/tex-index.html

I can't emphasize enough how much better it is to use a system like (La)Tex or troff or docbook for writing papers than it is to use a word processor. (Though I've only really used the first two.) Separation of content and formatting (however imperfect the implementation is in LaTeX or troff) in a plain text file really is the way to go.

Re:too little, too late?

[c_forq]

When your research paper is on topics such as Jay's Treaty of 1795 (also known as the Treaty of London), disparity between income and wealth, or inequality and poverty in Brazil Microsoft Word gets the job done just fine.

Re:too little, too late?

[dakameleon]

Newsflash! App produced by OS manufacture runs more like a native app than one put together by coders in their spare time!

Re:too little, too late?

[pato101]

I personally do not use LaTeX directly:
www.lyx.org

Re:too little, too late?

[Anonymous Coward]

Come back when iWork can use the open format and ISO standard called ODF. Don't you people get it? It's time for close proprietary formats to die. We should be able to use what applications we like and share our documents with common formats.

Re:too little, too late?

[Just Some Guy]

you can probably get them into ODF with some simple scripts, or potentially even simple XSL transforms.

If they are that congruent, then I wish they'd have just used the ISO standard format rather than an alternate, less compatible form.

Re:too little, too late?

[mblase]

I think Pages has been and is misrepresented as a word processor. It's really a page-design and layout tool. Rather than "Apple's word processor" I think of it as "Indesign lite".

IIRC, part of the redesign of Pages in iWork '08 was to give it a more word-processey mode you could toggle.

Agrees on the "Indesign lite", but neither I nor my wife have ever had cause to use it that way.

Re:too little, too late?

[MMC Monster]

You use an open format so that when you need to change software, you can do so. You also do it so that when the proprietary format is no longer supported (ie: Word95 doc, Wordstar, WordPerfect5.1), you are not left out in the cold.

Re:too little, too late?

[Lumpy]

I also agree that Keynote kicks the living and utter crap out of Powerpoint and other presentation apps out there. I got a powerbook simply for presentations because using keynote makes all other presenters look like bumbling amateurs when they follow your presentation.

The content and information should be what they make decisions on, but ever since I switched to apple and Keynote, My project proposals have been approved over others. It's interesting how you can sway a room of executives with pretty shiny presentations.

Re:too little, too late?

[dominator]

So, while it's true that iWorks is the only real option for editing them now, it shouldn't be too hard to convert them in the future - you can probably get them into ODF with some simple scripts, or potentially even simple XSL transforms.

In my experience, these things are never simple. You'd think "hey, turning OOXML or ODF into AbiWord's format should be a simple XSL transform or a few simple scripts. They're all XML formats, after all." Where in reality, it's more like 10k lines of C++ code to do a halfway decent job.

Re:too little, too late?

[ari_j]

I also end up using Word for most of my real writing, although I would prefer LaTeX. There are a couple of reasons for this, one of them being interoperability with others but the other being that it is next to impossible without spending (read: wasting) weeks of my time setting up templates and styles in order to format legal documents and citation styles. It's really rather tragic.

Re:too little, too late?

[stewbacca]

Pages is more of a layout program than a word processor. Considering Word is a horrible layout alternative, Pages is good for people who need to make brochures, pamphlets, flyers AND have the need to type a fancy letter. Pages is more of a competition to Microsoft Publisher, not Word. And in that endeavor, it kills Publisher...twice....then craps on the remains....

In all seriousness though, I wish Apple would make a real office suite, instead of this very nice design-oriented suite. This is why OS X will always remain a "niche" product and I'm not sure I can say Apple really cares to be anything but.

Re:too little, too late?

[shelterpaw]

I have iWork 08 and while it's very cool, it can't be used for heavy lifting. Large documents with lots of embed tables crashes Pages and Numbers becomes dog slow with several large tables. You also cannot dynamically link numbers tables to pages documents. Numbers doesn't have any built in scripting.

If you have a small paper, you can use the iWork programs, but anything that's a little more serious you cannot.

Re:too little, too late?

[Anonymous Coward]

this "wife" is probably one of those standard Slashdot user "imaginary wives". Let's humor him, okay? You'd expect the same courtesy if you ever mentioned your "wife" on here.

Re:too little, too late?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yupe, the same thing happened to me. Word kept changing the heading style and the automatic numbering got messed up between closing the file and opening the file several times. Sometimes, a subheading started with a number other than 1, e.g.
1. First Heading
1.4 First First Level Subheading
1.4.1 First Second Level Subheading
It required me to remove the style from the incorrectly numbered one and re-applied it.

It also kept changing the widows and orphans too, so the page layout got messed up. Sometimes an Equation Editor object got corrupted during a save and the document couldn't be saved with a warning that there was not enough space left on a HD that still had several gigabytes of free space (even the warning was messed up). I had to hunt down the offending object and redid the equation. It was really PitA. A lot of time, I spent time and effort fighting Word instead of Word helping me to be productive (somewhat typical of Microsoft tools, they get in the way of getting the job done). I warned people away from using Word for such a purpose ever since. LaTeX is the most logical choice. I wish I had learned and used it from the get go.

Re:too little, too late?

[Dragonmaster Lou]

I suggest LyX. Easiest LaTeX editor (technically it's not a LaTeX editor, but it's close enough to one) out there.

Re:too little, too late?

[mlewan]

"iWork is perfectly safe to store things in, at least in the sense of being able to get things back out in the future."

There is a big difference between "being able to" and "easily being able to". So far no one, as far as I know, have gone through the trouble of writing a .pages importer on any platform.

I would not store any single document, not even today's grocery shopping list, in Pages alone. The risk is too big that it will be practically illegible in a few years' time. I have been burnt by similar situations too often in the past. Luckily one can easily export backups in the form of rtf, doc and pdf copies.

Re:too little, too late?

[Anonymous Coward]

By your logic then you shouldn't use a Mac at all. Go build a PC and run Linux. Otherwise you're "locked in".

Re:too little, too late?

[testerus]

Not to be confused with Textmaker which is not ported to OS X yet.

Re:too little, too late?

[teh kurisu]

What features are you looking for in a real office suite, out of interest? I'm one of those people that's only vaguely aware of what MS Office/OpenOffice can do.

Well, targeting a niche in the market is a tried and tested business strategy. Especially if you target a niche that is easily parted from their cash, as Apple have managed ;)

Re:too little, too late?

[stewbacca]

Oh I'm a niche customer for sure. I've owned probably 15 Macs over the past 20 years, and enjoy the benefits of higher quality in our niche. My wishes for a full-fledged office sweet from Apple are because I can't stand the mediocrity of Microsoft's offerings. Anything that makes my computing life better is welcomed. Anything that makes the industry try harder is also welcomed. I also think the lack of a professional grade office suite (tightly integrated into Mac OS X by Apple) is the only thing keeping Apple a niche company. If they WANTED to, they could do it. I just dont' think they want to ;-)

Re:too little, too late?

[nine-times]

I think Pages has been and is misrepresented as a word processor. It's really a page-design and layout tool. Rather than "Apple's word processor" I think of it as "Indesign lite".

True, but this has begun to change with Pages '08. They've obviously put some work into improving the text-input functionality of the program while keeping the excellent layout/design functionality.

Re:too little, too late?

[Anonymous Coward]

...iWork looks, feels, and behaves like a native program. *Office doesn't.

Duh - StarOffice doesn't support OSX!

Re:too little, too late?

[Anonymous Coward]

I used LyX for a while, and it's great, but completely unnecessary. LaTeX is simple enough that you could learn most of what you need in a few hours, from tutorials you can find on the web, and then use your favorite text editor. (I like emacs in viper mode.)

Few hours? I taught my ex-girlfriend almost everything she needed to know in about 20 minutes. We just sat down together and slowly ported the beginnings of her MS Word formatted thesis to LaTeX, via a simple cut and paste and step-by-step addition of necessary macros. She liked it enough that she completely dropped Word.

Getting bibtex to work took another 20 minutes or so, mostly because I don't know the reference formats off-hand. I used EndNote to generate them when I wrote mine.

Re:too little, too late?

[Anonymous Coward]

Where in reality, it's more like 10k lines of C++ code to do a halfway decent job.

Yeah, but it could probably be done in Perl with one regular expression. Then it's only 10k lines if you turn on line wrapping.

Re:too little, too late?

[RealGrouchy]

Where, pray tell, was your WIFE during all of this? Playing with LaTeX?

- RG>

Re:too little, too late?

[Anonymous Coward]

I use NeoOffice every day to work with very long legal documents that have hundreds of footnotes, and some rather complex formatting. NeoOffice has never caused any problems for me at all, its handling of footnotes is excellent. I routinely use NeoOffice to correct footnotes that my colleagues created using Word. I suspect your problems were user error.

Re:too little, too late?

[goose-incarnated]

LaTeX is amazing, but hacking a plain text file is a bit rough for 95% of the people out there.

Actually, you might be pleasantly surprised if you actually did a rough poll. Most serious authors (i.e. anyone who actually wants to publish in a journal, book, etc) rather prefer simply typing in their material, instead of futzing with the GUI, trying to get the document to look decent.

It's only non-publication types of work that shine in a word-processor (letters, work reports, etc).

i for one

[Anonymous Coward]

welcome our NeoOffice overlords.

Torrent?

[nursegirl]

The download site says it'll take forever. Anyone know where to find a torrent? Using Google I can find the 1.1 torrent on the site, and a few 2.0 and 2.1 torrents on other sites.

Re:Torrent?

[friedo]

Here ya go. That's the PPC version -- I didn't download the Intel version so I'm not gonna seed it.

Re:Torrent?

[friedo]

Oops, that probably won't work. My power went out last night and my NAT got all hosed. I don't have time to fix it right now. My bad.

Re:Torrent?

[itwerx]

The download site says it'll take forever.

Not that slow - I just got it down from between 300KBs and 1.7MBs. Took a grand total of about 5 minutes.

Re:Torrent?

[Temkin]

The download site says it'll take forever. Anyone know where to find a torrent?

They publish torrent seeds on the download page. I'm not going to publish the links here to be fair to them and make people click thru the donation request. These guys are doing a great job on a shoestring budget. Please consider making a donation. Even a couple Dollars/Euros helps!

I have bt running on a hosted server, and am donating bandwidth to them (The counter rolls at the end of the month anyway...). It's pushing ~1Mb/sec back at the cloud.

Re:Torrent?

[Hillgiant]

5 minutes?!?!? Who has that kind of time?

They want to spy on you, for some reason . . .

[Anonymous Coward]

NeoOffice's download page has been changed, and now requires you to have cookies enabled in order to reach the download links. WTF? There's no technical reason for it.

I guess it's true: nothing good lasts forever...

Neo Office

[alfredo]

I've downloaded and noticed it looks better. It didn't take too long to launch on this seven year old Mac. Over then next few days I will put it through its paces to see if it runs as good as it looks.

Sad sack

[flyingfsck]

Why are Mac users such a negative, sour puss, bunch of sad sacks?

At least, that is the impression one gets from reading Sloshdat. Whenever some people release a new software tool for the Mac, there are ten thousand sad sacks that shoot it down for no good reason.

Re:Sad sack

[stewbacca]

Because, in general, Mac users have a much more refined expectation from computers/software/electronics/life. The reason we are Mac users in the first place is because we don't choose to be stuck with mediocre and crash prone products that are so prevalent in the Windows world. As the Mac gets more popular, more of this mediocrity starts creeping into the Mac world. Think of a Mercedes owner who is expected to buy his floor mats at Wal-Mart....not gonna happen.

Chances are the "no good reason" is simply something you either don't understand, or just don't care about. We have high standards and we care about things working correctly and well, not kind of working and/or works with tweaking. Our high standards ensure continuing high quality products. Deal with it.

Re:also of interest to mac users:

[pembo13]

It would be nice if Slashdot added a feature in which a post could be modded down enough that it was actually deleted (lazy deletion at least)

Framemaker

[HockeyPuck]

For single author, single file documents, MSWord, Openoffice work fine, but when your working on books, larger documents that are comprised of "1 file per chapter" and require easy to use templates (MSWord creates new font templates automatically) so multiple authors can work on the document at the same time. I prefer to use Adobe Framemaker (unix/mac version available as well).

With properly defined templates prior to writing, it's a snap. Though you could spend a while making 'standardized templates'. I'm a professional tech writer and author many documents (think User's Guides, Service Guides etc..) for a large computer company. There's a dozen of us on the team and this makes it easy to bring a new techwriter up to speed.

The best part, what you see on the screen is exactly what gets printed out. Framemaker has it's place. For making a quick document not really, but for more "industrial efforts" it's definitely better than both word and open/star/neo office.

Re:Framemaker

[Kjella]

(MSWord creates new font templates automatically)

Yes, and I hate that feature. Usually it means that if you recieve a document, it has 100s of styles from all sorts of manual changes, mangled "Header 1" and "Overskrift 1" (English and Norwegian respectively) and if you ever try to unfuck it chances are the document will go suicidal on you and even if you did, it'd fuck up just as quickly as you send it out again. Most documents should allow only a few styles, headers level 1 through x, normal, table, bullets/numbered...

Re:Framemaker

[Anonymous Coward]

There's an interesting article on doing the same Framemaker-like things in NeoOffice/Openoffice here. And of course Scribus on Linux is very important.

http://www.linux.com/articles/51448 "Creating a book with OpenOffice.org Writer
By Dmitri Popov on January 27, 2006 (8:00:00 AM) "

http://www.linux.com/articles/62231 "Desktop publishing with OpenOffice.org
By Bruce Byfield on June 06, 2007 (8:00:00 AM) "

http://www.linux.com/articles/52351 "Desktop publishing with Writer and Scribus
By Dmitri Popov on February 27, 2006 (8:00:00 AM) "

http://www.linux.com/articles/36822 "Open source cracks publishing wide open
By Mary E. Tyler on June 17, 2004 (8:00:00 AM) "

Re:Framemaker

[bazorg]

I'm a professional tech writer and [...] Framemaker has it's place.
Ha-ha!

Re:Framemaker

[fermion]

What moved me away from MS Office was it lack of support for single author multi file documents, or indeed documents in which an author was in strict control of the content of a single file. OO.org does a very good job of bringing this multiple files into a single master document and creating a cohesive unified document.

The key, as is often the case, is separating the responsibility for content from the visual formating. Each author is responsible for content, while the master document is responsible for formatting via style sheets. To me this separation i natural. My writing often starts out in a text editor, and only later moves to Latex or word processor or some GUI page layout application.

More on topic, I look forward to looking at this release of NeoOffice. I suppose the versioning has been updated to match the OO.org release, and does not necessarily reflect that expected stability of a 2.2 release. As for X11 use, I don't see the reason to move away from the existing OO.org port.

Re:Framemaker

[Anonymous Coward]

"I prefer to use Adobe Framemaker (unix/mac version available as well)."

Not quite; FrameMaker 8 was recently released supporting Windows and Unix. No Mac version. Long story, not fun.

Framemaker is so EOL though...

[SuperKendall]

I loved Framemaker. I still help someone with a Mac, who loves Framemaker and still does most work with it.

But Adobe as EOL (End Of Lifed) Framemaker. I don't know how much longer we'll be able to use it, and certainly I don't think we'll see a Universal version (unless there is one I was not aware of)? In any case, Adobe has made it pretty clear that's not where you should start looking for a document processor to take you into the future.

Re:Framemaker is so EOL though...

[NMerriam]

But Adobe as EOL (End Of Lifed) Framemaker. I don't know how much longer we'll be able to use it, and certainly I don't think we'll see a Universal version (unless there is one I was not aware of)? In any case, Adobe has made it pretty clear that's not where you should start looking for a document processor to take you into the future.

I feel your pain. my sister is a tech writer and can't believe FrameMaker is EOL, I'm an artist and can't believe Freehand is dead. Adobe has a strange habit of killing products for which no really suitable replacement exists.

(for those who haven't been in the design world for 15+ years, Freehand is not just an illustration program, it was also the single finest small document design application ever made. Adobe saying it can be replaced by Illustrator + InDesign is like saying you can replace Framemaker with MS Word + InDesign)

Re:Framemaker is so EOL though...

[computer_chacham]

Well, you can always use the shiny new Windows/Solaris version. Full Unicode support now. Yay!

Re:Framemaker is so EOL though...

[raju1kabir]

I'm an artist and can't believe Freehand is dead.

WHAT? That's horrible. Almost every task can be done in Freehand in about half the time it takes in Illustrator. I can't believe they killed it. Well, yes I can.

Here's hoping the last version of Freehand keeps working in newer versions of OSX. The day it doesn't is the day I stop doing drawing on the computer.

Re:Framemaker is so EOL though...

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

But Adobe as EOL (End Of Lifed) Framemaker.

To clarify, Adobe did EOL Framemaker and stopped supporting all but the Windows version. Then, they un-EOL'd Framemaker and are releasing a new version (Windows only). This new version is mostly fixes for flaws and deficiencies and is developed by a team outsourced to India who seem pretty clueless (I met a few of them while they were demoing the new version). I think they're responding to MadCap's new Blaze program which is being marketed as a direct competitor to Framemaker with all the features and a better UI engineered from the ground up. Sadly, neither MadCap nor Adobe seem interested in a non-Windows version.

Re:Framemaker is so EOL though...

[SuperKendall]

Thanks for letting me know about Blaze, I'll pester them for a Mac and/or Linux version... I would pester Adobe to also update the Mac version, but I fear there's just too much inertia for them to do much.

Found Torrent

[Anonymous Coward]

http://torrents.thepiratebay.org/3775143/NeoOffice _Mac_OS_X_%5BIntel%5D.3775143.TPB.torrent

Description at http://thepiratebay.org/tor/3775143/NeoOffice_Mac_ OS_X_%5BIntel%5D

Bandwidth abuse?

[NMerriam]

I appreciate the religious purity of putting both the binaries and source code in every download package, but wouldn't it be a bit kinder to the internet in general, the mirrors in particular, and all the users on non-infinite-speed connections, to allow you to download ONLY the binaries?

I mean, out of 152MB for the PPC download, 20MB of that was source code that only.01% of the users will ever even glance at out of curiosity.

Re:Bandwidth abuse?

[skingers6894]

...or download the source and compile yourself - a 132MB saving for the Internet...

Re:Bandwidth abuse?

[TheRaven64]

Last time I compiled OpenOffice.org was on a 1.3GHz Athlon, and it took about a day. You'd have to have a really slow connection (slower than dialup) for that to be faster than downloading the binary.

where is it?

[commodoresloat]

The link you have says Not Found, and other links that come up on google point there also. Anyone know where it went?

Re:where is it?

[totally bogus dude]

Just FYI, that link -- http://www.uoregon.edu/~koch/texshop/ -- works for me(tm). Maybe it was a temporary problem. Is it working for you now, or something mysterious afoot?

Re:also of interest to mac users:

[raydobbs]

There is - it's called -6 to Coward posts.

Then never browse beneath 0.

iWork, not iWorks

[Pliep]

What is the deal with half of the world not spelling the various names of Office applications correctly?

iWork, not iWorks
Excel, not Excell
Word, not Words

Is this an inheritance of the "MS Works" suite?

Re:iWork, not iWorks

[mkiwi]

iWork, not iWorks
Excel, not Excell
Word, not Words
Is this an inheritance of the "MS Works" suite?

Exactly, we've been polluted be a product that does exactly the opposite of what it is named.

For some reason, Microsoft does this. Another example is (in the old days) typing "win" to start windows. I mean there was the solitaire game, but that was totally rigged so that you lost and had to start over all the time. I hardly call it winning when one of Microsoft's core system components is essentially a big time-waster!

hooray for OO/Neo

[Anonymous Coward]

I support MS Office users, the different PowerPoint formats are always tripping them up. I break the slides up into the individual jpegs, then play them in order. If nothing else, I just play them on my Archos to save the day.

The presentation program in NeoOffice is excellent. Apple should be contributing to this instead of their not-invented-here iWorks. Their customers would be a lot happier.

Re:hooray for OO/Neo

[LKM]

The presentation program in NeoOffice is excellent. Apple should be contributing to this instead of their not-invented-here iWorks. Their customers would be a lot happier.

I don't think Apple could just take NeoOffice and do whatever it wants with it without a huge outcry from the community. But to reach something like Keynote, you need to do exactly that.

Not sure how you think Apple working with the NeoOffice guys would work...

Re:hooray for OO/Neo

[rvw]

I don't think Apple could just take NeoOffice and do whatever it wants with it without a huge outcry from the community. But to reach something like Keynote, you need to do exactly that. I don't know about NeoOffice, but they could take OpenOffice Aqua, support that. The problem with NeoOffice is that the interface is slow, although they made enormous improvements. I hope 2.2 is another speed improvement. I'm curious how OpenOffice Aqua will perform. Apple could help here really good. Furthermore NeoOffice is really slow with large documents with many pictures in it.

For writing papers, check out Mellel

[LKM]

Last time I did a research paper

I use Mellel for papers and the like. If the thing you're writing is highly structured (wich chapters and footnotes and endnotes and citations), nothing beats Mellel, in my opinion. It's small, cheap, fast, and does everything you would want, easily. Rearrange chapters? Drag and drop them in the outline. Change the font of all second level chapters? Easy. Multiple languages? No problem, even mixing rtl and ltr.

I know I sound like a shill, but I'm actually a paying customer and have no ties - financial or otherwise - to the company making Mellel. Check the app out. It's one of the reasons I use a Mac.

Re:For writing papers, check out Mellel

[Zhe Mappel]

I don't mind praising a great program.

Mellel is fast, intuitive, powerfully adaptive, well-supported and affordable. The cream of the crop in indy OS X word processors.

Re:For writing papers, check out Mellel

[stewbacca]

Does it have an APA template? It blows my mind that Microsoft hasn't included a FULL APA style as a default choice...a page that opens with double spacing, Times New Roman size 12, title page formatting, header and page number, and most importantly, hanging indents for reference page. As many times as I setup my Word documents with theses settings, Word gets its usual amnesia and forgets nearly all the settings I made (or worse yet, applies its own settings to what it THINKS I want). I only have 3 classes left and my Thesis, but I'm thinking this might be worth the cost just for writing my thesis.

Re:For writing papers, check out Mellel

[Zhe Mappel]

I've not used it, but there's one here. Get the demo and try it out.

http://www.redlers.com/downloadtemplate.html

After reading your post, Safari felt snappier!

[Anonymous Coward]

Must be some kind of digestive effect.

Re:also of interest to mac users:

[niceone]

It would be nice if Slashdot added a feature in which a post could be modded down enough that it was actually deleted (lazy deletion at least)

I think doing that would screw up the research of future generations of archaeologists studying privative herds of geeks.

MLA package for LaTeX...

[bundaegi]

Is that any use?

http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contr ib/mla-paper/

Not any more. New word processing mode.

[smurfsurf]

> I think Pages has been and is misrepresented as a word processor. It's really a page-design and layout tool.
> Rather than "Apple's word processor" I think of it as "Indesign lite".

I certainly agree for the previous version of Pages and it made it too complicated for the big "I just want to write a letter" crowd. But this has changed with the latest version. The new Pages' word processing mode is just this. Best word processor for the average joe, IMHO. Not so suitable for extensive scientific papers due to missing features.

Re:Not any more. New word processing mode.

[Macka]

Totally agree. The new style draw has given me more (easy) control over the layout of my documents than I've ever experienced in MS Word or OO (NeoOffice). It's so easy to change an existing style to something else (for the whole doc) or even create new versions for yourself. Hint: when the down triangle next to a style turns red, click on it. You can adopt the change you've just made as a global setting or just save it as a new one. It's also interesting to import MS Word docs and look at the styles draw to see how many styles the brain dead doc author has tried for the same thing.

this cures the symptoms but not the disease

[roesti]

So, while it's true that iWorks is the only real option for editing them now, it shouldn't be too hard to convert them in the future

What it doesn't do is answer the basic question of why we need another set of document formats. We've heard this story before and we've always hated it. However, I'd love to hear from Apple about why TextEdit in Leopard supports ODF and iWork does not.

It's useful to know that Apple has kept the iWork file formats well-documented so far. Given that, there's a chance that NeoOffice will eventually read and write iWork files, and there's a chance that iWork will read and write ODF. We can always hope for both, of course.

If you're happy enough to waste your time converting documents backwards and forwards, feel free to do it again. I'd rather not encourage this sort of behaviour, personally. Eventually, someone else will work around the problem for you, so that when you have to put up with this sort of nonsense, you probably won't even notice. Hey, it's happened before.

Re:this cures the symptoms but not the disease

[shmlco]

"What it doesn't do is answer the basic question of why we need another set of document formats."

Because it's a floor wax and a dessert topping? If it were just another WP I'd agree, but it's also an exceptionally easy to use and well thought out page layout program.

Some people care more about the work they can do with their computers, and how easily, than whether or not a format is "open" or not.

Re:this cures the symptoms but not the disease

[MMC Monster]

So, while it's true that iWorks is the only real option for editing them now, it shouldn't be too hard to convert them in the future

What it doesn't do is answer the basic question of why we need another set of document formats. We've heard this story before and we've always hated it. However, I'd love to hear from Apple about why TextEdit in Leopard supports ODF and iWork does not.

My guess is that iWork does stuff that is not currently defined in the ODF format. My hope is that the commission that is in charge of ODF will extend it to support everything available in iWork. (Those slide transitions in the iWork presentation software are pretty freakin' cool!)

Re:this cures the symptoms but not the disease

[aliquis]

So you are saying the program can't be logical to use because the document format are open?

How does a good program make the format decision better?

Apple makes a lot of good stuff, but the vendor lockin suck, and in some cases they get away with releasing inferior products due to it.

Re:this cures the symptoms but not the disease

[nine-times]

What it doesn't do is answer the basic question of why we need another set of document formats.?

Another format isn't really a problem. Depending on your goals and needs, it might make sense to create a new file-format. There's a reason why we have GIF, JPEG, and 24-bit PNG, and haven't tried to drop 2 in favor of the third-- they each have their own strengths, weaknesses, and uses. I don't see why word-processing formats should be different from that.

The key thing, however, is that any new formats be kept open and documented so that other programs can support them if the developers choose to do so. AFAIK, there are no secrets or patents that keep developers from supporting iWork documents. They're just XML, and OpenOffice could support them if OpenOffice developers think it's worth the effort.

However, I'd love to hear from Apple about why TextEdit in Leopard supports ODF and iWork does not.

I'd like to hear that too. I've submitted feedback on iWork 08 to Apple, requesting that they include support for ODF. I didn't know that ODF was supported in TextEdit in Leopard, and it makes me wonder whether Apple build ODF support into the OS instead of building it into the application, meaning that iWork will be able to support ODF in Leopard.

Re:this cures the symptoms but not the disease

[Anonymous Coward]

I think that tells me everything I need to know about why I don't need to get iWork. Or maybe it just tells me not to go to any presentations you give. Unlike many people, I value conveying information ahead of looking "pretty freakin' cool".

Re:this cures the symptoms but not the disease

[Anonymous Coward]

My guess is that iWork does stuff that is not currently defined in the ODF format.

Quite possibly it's the opposite of that situation as well. A quick look at both sets of documentation shows that Apple's (which isn't verbose by any means, but seems pretty much complete) is shorter than the table of contents for the ODF.

It's probably another example of Apple's well-documented "less is more" philosophy/obsession.

Re:also of interest to mac users:

[Anonymous Coward]

actually, browsing the comments at -1 can be entertaining. it's something to do while at work. (aside from working)

Numbers not up to scratch yet, plus no encryption

[mccalli]

Numbers isn't as powerful as the OpenOffice/NeoOffice spreadsheet yet. Even for me, who only uses it to keep track of hosting costs, the lack of autofilter on Numbers means it can't cope with my fairly simple needs (large block of data which I need to see subsets of pretty quickly). You -can- filter, but it's via a long-winded dialog not a nice set of drop-downs a la autofilter.

Others have mentioned ODF, but there's also password-protection missing from iWork. There's ways round of it course - you can create an encrypted disk image and save to that, but that's more faff than just directly password protecting the file.

I like iWork 08 - feels faster and better than iWork 06. I'm still wavering for upgrades though - I'm not a Keynote user which is its strongest feature, and I rarely use Pages beyond a single one-page letter. Numbers won't handle my workload yet, so I may well just wait until the next revision and see if autofilter/ODF support/password protection gets added to that.

Cheers,
Ian

NeoOffice opens its web site on launch

[raju1kabir]

I finally gave up on NeoOffice for a reason which sounds sort of trivial, but over time came to annoy me so much that I couldn't stand it any longer.

Whenever I launch NeoOffice, my web browser pops to the front and some stupid NeoOffice web page loads. I've never looked at the page; it may be something very important, but I find this sort of behaviour so annoying that I always close it as it's loading. A program should do what you tell it to. This stupid business with windows always opening and seizing focus as side-effects of other things is exactly why I hate the Windows interface, and I sure don't want it on my Mac.

I searched on the web and never found a way to disable this nuisance, so I gave up and switched to OpenOffice.org's version.

Re:NeoOffice opens its web site on launch

[Anonymous Coward]

Hahahaha... thus: They should improve the message shown; it tells you you're running an OLD version that should be upgraded.

Re:NeoOffice opens its web site on launch

[vague disclaimer]

It is telling you there is a patch available....

Re:NeoOffice opens its web site on launch

[Gorgonzola]

It appears that they got rid of that (indeed annoying) feature in this version.

Re:NeoOffice opens its web site on launch

[Anonymous Coward]

it means you were running a beta version. download a full version and that will not happen.

Re:NeoOffice opens its web site on launch

[raju1kabir]

Ok, thanks, in that case I will give the new one a try.

Re:NeoOffice opens its web site on launch

[richmaine]

That "feature" greatly annoyed me also. In addition to the distraction, it substantially slowed down the launch (which is slow enough anyway). It did *NOT* go away when you went to a non-beta version, as suggested by another poster here - not to speak of the fact that there was an awful long time (a year or so? - I forget), when there was non non-beta version. I haven't checked the new version yet (I see someone says the "feature" went away), but after I griped enough, someone pointed me to a way to disable it in the prior versions. Create files named .noshowdonationpage and .nocheckforpatches in the Contents/MacOS dir of the app.

Re:NeoOffice opens its web site on launch

[domatic]

The forums on neooffice.org has a post from one of the authors that tells you how to disable the nag screen and upgrade notice. Out of respect for the author's stated intentions in that post, I'm not going to repeat the method here. Searching the neooffice.org forums will turn up the post so pluby can speak for himself on this one.

My installs have been running without the browser nags for most of the year now.

Re:NeoOffice opens its web site on launch

[SuperBanana]

Thanks for linking to the post!

Re:also of interest to mac users:

[Morky]

I agree, except that there are degrees of trollness. This one was not entertaining. No copy-and-paste trolls are interesting.

one thing microsoft needs to do

[Danzigism]

I'm so tired of every product beginning with "Windows" or "Microsoft".. On a nice default installation of Vista, you click on All Programs you see about 15 programs all beginning with Windows.. It's really annoying actually.. Windows Calendar, Windows Contact, Windows Defender, Windows DVD Maker, Windows Fax & Scan, Windows Live Messenger, Windows Mail, Windows Media Center, Windows Meeting Space, Windows Movie Maker, Windows Photo Gallery, Windows Update...

WHEW! ok.. I'm so tired of seeing that word in front of the title.. I'm thinking about going through and renaming them all to Calender, Contact, Defender, etc... just because it'd look a little more unique and wouldn't piss me off..

easy to work

[Anonymous Coward]

Just give them a few hundred thou, a few picks from the refurb page, and have at it. Look at the wonderful job they've done with nothing. Gawd, they are a couple of geniuses.

OO Aqua, wtf is that? Why wait years for something that may not happen?

Re:easy to work

[LKM]

Just give them a few hundred thou, a few picks from the refurb page, and have at it. Look at the wonderful job they've done with nothing. Gawd, they are a couple of geniuses.

What good would throwing money at an open source project do? They would be able to clone Microsoft Office faster? Yay. Thanks, but I'll take iWork over an Office Clone.

I actually prefer a simple, well-designed works suite over a perfect Office clone.

iWork?

[Andrei D]

No, thanks. IWasteTimeOnSlashdot

Re:also of interest to mac users:

[thomas.galvin]

It would be nice if Slashdot added a feature in which a post could be modded down enough that it was actually deleted (lazy deletion at least) When I read this, I immediately thought "there's really no reason to remove a post entirely. That's just censorship."

Then I clicked the "Parent" link.

Now, I think it would be nice if Slashdot added a feature in which a post could be modded down enough that the poster was actually deleted.

NeoOffice is the best FOSS office package for Macs

[cunamara]

I've used NeoOffice for a little over 1 1/2 years. I have found that the interoperability with M$ Office is excellent, which is important to me as I am a health care consultant and work in environments that use Windows and M$ Office exclusively. There are many complaints that the application is slow but I have not found this to be the case. It is slower to launch than Word or Excel and it takes a bit longer to open a document, but that costs me maybe four minutes a day. Drinking less coffee will often lessen the annoyance people feel over these things. In actual use, NeoOffice looks and feels mostly like a Mac application. The major difference is in how preferences are managed, which is radically not Mac-like.

There are several issues in NeoOffice which are inherited from the OpenOffice.org project that cause performance bottlenecks. The NeoOffice team has been methodically replacing them, resulting in an application that is faster with each iteration. Hopefully that trend will continue. In the meantime, I find NeoOffice perfectly usable on a daily basis in my job.

odf support

[Salsaman]

Interesting, but does it support odf format ? If not then it`s missing a big chunk of interoperability.

Re:odf support

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting, but does it support odf format ? If not then it`s missing a big chunk of interoperability.

Either you're trolling or just haven't looked yourself...

ODF is the default file format.

Re:odf support

[Salsaman]

No I wasn`t trolling. I looked at the features on the site, and there was no mention of it.

But anyway, I am pleased to see that it supports it by default.

Re:odf support

[IntergalacticWalrus]

The thing's a freaking derivative of OpenOffice. Why would it use anything else as its standard format?

Re:also of interest to mac users:

[inca34]

After getting lazily deleted enough times, moderate the account. E.g. he posts, the post doesn't appear until it's seen as something not a waste of time.

Anyone still use TeX?

[inca34]

I mean the original TeX, not LaTeX. I could never get used to the "n" pass processing that LaTeX does while Tex uses 1 pass. It also kind of bothered me that LaTeX adds no functionality to TeX... oh well, anyway, does anyone still use plain TeX?

Re:Anyone still use TeX?

[Anonymous Coward]

The 'n' passes (2) are used to update the references in the document. If you refer to something before that something is actually declared in the document, that's okay; it's done via the multi pass. The data is stored in the .AUX file. However after the first multipass run you shouldn't have to run it more than once subsequently.

Re:Anyone still use TeX?

[poopdeville]

(plain) TeX is a programming language for typesetting. LaTeX is a group of related macro packages written in TeX -- a kind of framework so you don't have to keep typing boring things like \vskip 1em or deal with writing your own section/page/footnote numbering routines. Plain TeX is still in use, but mostly for writing personalized macros/packages (or editing existing packages). You can still use plain TeX commands in a LaTeX document, but that isn't encouraged (for the sake of consistent layout and your sanity -- a few TeX commands were redefined in LaTeX and have different semantics).

Note that the 2-pass process is a TeX limitation, not a LaTeX limitation. For instance, say you wrote your own table of contents macro to take in chapter names, numbers, and the pages on which chapters starts. The chapter and page numbers are computed after the pages before each listed page is rendered (including, presumably, the table of contents), so you'd have to cache the chapter and page numbers in a file somewhere for the next run to use. This, in fact, is how LaTeX does it. The problem is more complicated than I outlined. Details are available in the TeXbook.

Re:also of interest to mac users:

[frdmfghtr]

After getting lazily deleted enough times, moderate the account. E.g. he posts, the post doesn't appear until it's seen as something not a waste of time.

So we would never see that poster again?

How do you determine if a post is not a waste of time until you read it, which you can't do until it's determined not to be a waste of time?

Structured documents

[slashbart]

Having just finished a project for the Space Station http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/7190 I appreciate the need for structure documentation. We've used the following methods, for different parts of the documentation.

Word:
pros: everyone has it, except when you're using Linux.
Cons: buggy. Master documents are awful, document navigation inserts unwanted and often wrong formatting in the document. Styles are inconsistent, and whenever someone with automatic styles even touches the document, all the careful formatting is broken.

OOo:
pros: really xplatform. documents stay intact. Styles pretty good, Document navigator works well, master documents work well. Xml format allows scripting (for instance putting cvs numbers inside the document :-)
Cons: problems with outline numbering. can be worked around but are easy to trigger.

Docbook:
pros: very well structured. You can use your favorite texteditor
cons: easy to mess up the xml structure. Very hard to structurally edit, you have no overview when wading through pages of xml.

Rst: (from python doc)
pros: simple, structured, easy on the eyes, favorite texteditor
cons: too simple for large documents.

After all these years of doc writing and programming, I think my favorite setup would be as yet non-existing:

Stripped down OOo:
Impossible to (re)define styles: you live with the styles that are in a custom template
No manual formatting. Italic, Bold, fonts, all that stuff is gone
No frames, Images go inline!

A database with ODF blobs, that can be xreffed from your document, and shows live in your document.

I'd love to build something like that actually, but don't have the time at the moment.

Bart

Re:Numbers not up to scratch yet, plus no encrypti

[Steamhead]

Word document encryption is easily defeated. There are tools to do so in under 5 minutes. Security through obscurity is no security at all. If you wish to have true security I suggest something like TrueCrypt.

Re:Numbers not up to scratch yet, plus no encrypti

[mccalli]

Word document encryption is easily defeated.

Perhaps, but I'm not talking about Word. I'm talking about NeoOffice/OpenOffice, which uses 128-bit AES, same as the TrueCrypt you're pointing to. No reason why iWork couldn 't use AES for its encryption too.

Cheers,
Ian

Makes everyone GPL compliant & guarantees free

[soullessbastard]

Disclaimer: I am a founder of the NeoOffice project.

The reason to include the source code is both moral and practical.

From a practical standpoint, it ensures that everyone providing NeoOffice needs to take no special action to comply with the GPL. According to our interpretation, anyone who provides a binary that is licensed under GPL is also obligated to provide the source code for that program. By placing the source code package within our disk images, anyone and everyone who provides the disk images is automatically providing source code. Everyone is fully compliant with even the strictist interpretation of the GPL without needing to do any extra work. This removes a lot of potential hassles and liability for our mirrors and other distributors.

From a moral standpoint, the origin of freedom within free software is the code. The GPL applies to the code, not the binaries; you can't license a binary under GPL without licensing the code. The source code is the freedom. It is worth a few extra bits to give everyone their freedom, even if they choose never to exercise it. Even if our servers go dark, everyone automatically has the source. Anyone can always exercise their rights, guaranteed. No one can ever take that freedom away from them besides themselves.

I think removing some of the pointless drivel on YouTube might be a better way to spare bandwidth and be "kinder to the Internet" rather than removing the guarantee of people's freedom. Perhaps I am just a purist.

ed

Re:also of interest to mac users:

[inca34]

Just like we don't see MOST of the stories submitted to /. there ought to be a better form of sifting through the comments. For the most part I enjoy having all comments available, it's just a pain in the ass when you actually want to see the discussion. So I say make smarter filters or better filters that allow you to put the SPAM back in the can, so to say.

AppleWorks compatibility? Computer says no...

[Anonymous Coward]

My wife writes, and when we upgraded the old Beige G3 Mac for the Intel Core Duo 2GHz, I was a happy man. Not least because of the Enemy Territory shenanigans I could enjoy.

But there was no way to open her older version .cwk (ClarisWorks / AppleWorks 5) documents using the usual suspects. The trial version of Word said no. TextEdit threw up binary hands, declaring defeat. Then the new version of iWork was released which promised the ability to open .cwk files.

Maybe AppleWorks 6. Not AppleWorks 5.

So it looks like I'll be getting the old PowerPC Mac out of mothballs. Connecting the peripherals. Firing her up. Opening those docs and saving them as RTF documents onto a pen drive. Good job I installed a USB/FireWire card into the old baby, because otherwise I'd be looking at FireWire networking (I'd need to buy the right sort of cable for a one-off thing) or buying a USB floppy-disk reader (ditto).

Fat lot of good "backing up onto CD" did for me (external CD-RW ...I told you installing that USB/FireWire card was a good idea).

Moral: if you want something for posterity, save it in as many different formats as possible. And make sure they're not proprietary ones, because it could end in heartache.

Re:AppleWorks compatibility? Computer says no...

[wheatwilliams]

DataViz MacLink Plus is a commercial program which can handle your conversion needs with your older AppleWorks or ClarisWorks documents.

Re:also of interest to mac users:

[Anonymous Coward]

you want to delete Anonymous Coward?!

I am gonna give it a try

[Orig_Club_Soda]

I just got a new Mac Book Pro that I am doing fresh installs of all my software rather than migrating.... I'll give it a try before I re-install MS Office. I gave them $5 too.

Where's the love?

[drharris]

I'm a Mac user and I think iWork is a great app. But since forever OSX users have been bitching about the X11 requirement and saying "I'd use it if it were more native-like". Well, lots of developers have been working on this for YEARS and now all you can do is sputter on about how good iWork is. iWork is still *NOT* free software. Yet, contrary to endless other threads here, the voices of OSS advocates are nowhere to be found. How odd, really.. I would like to send out a heartfelt THANK YOU to all of the OOo developers who worked so hard so that OSX geeks like me can finally share native formats with our counterparts that are locked into Windows without having to resort to OSX or other "hacks". NeoOffice is worthy of commendation also, but I always viewed it as a stop-gap until OOo went truly cross-platform.

Re:Where's the love?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey I'm gonna download it and try it out. Thought I'd wait a bit for some of the slashdot effect to subside. But really I don't know much about using any of the Office suites, Microsoft, Apple, OO.org, KDE and Gnome's office efforts... I've hardly touched any of them. I may be archaic, but I like .text files and most of my note taking is done in vi but I did learn enough about emacs that it was usable for my programming classes. But really when I see these "complex" word processors I get a little bit confused cause there's no Esc mode etc like vi, and I start to wonder just WTF is wrong with just using a text editor?

The only thing I've used a word processor for recently is editing my resume and sometimes I wonder why bother when everyone wants it as MS .doc format but different versions of MS Word render it differently so what you see (ah perfection), may not be what the recruiter/employer sees when they open it. Gotta also tack on that piracy is easy so it's trivial to get a copy of whatever really. I prefer legit and opensource just cause who knows what's been done to those binaries, but realistically the pirates usually release a better version than the official version. I'm glad there's an open solution now that apparently is good enough to replace MS Word. I used to get pissed off at school when I was doing the 100% legit and linux/opensource custom compiled it all from scratch etc, and then the assignments would come in as MS documents and I'd have trouble viewing them.

So FWIW I appreciate there's apparently a real option out there. Thanks whoever. Also I think I read from Apple that as far as iWork goes, once the demo period expires it still is fully functional as a document viewer. That seems pretty cool to me, but then again I think MS released format viewers for their Office stuff too. It's funny I hate the built in Apple text editor cause it saves in RTF. Vim forever, but when that's not an option, hurray OpenOffice...

Re:Where's the love?

[alchemist68]

Here's some lovin'!

I've been an Apple guy my entire life, except for cutting my teenage teeth on Timex/Sinclair 1000 & 2068. My first Apple was an Apple IIGS, and after that PowerBook 520c, Blue & White PowerMac G3, and finally PowerMac G5 with dually 2.7 GHz PowerPC processors. OpenOffice 2.2.1, which requires X11, is my main office suite of choice after NeoOffice fell behind last year with releases. I like using OpenOffice, and it's nice to have a word processor that actually has the 'home' and 'end' keys behave as they should. I do not understand why so many Mac people flip out when having to use X11, it's easy to install, and OpenOffice and Gimp just require a typical Mac-install process with double-clicking on the icons to lauch the applications, again, all Mac-like. Just because these programs don't use a Mac-interface doesn't mean they should be shunned. I find it nice to use non-Mac interface software on a Mac, in fact, I've even compiled with assistance, XChat, requiring the X11 environment on my Mac - it was a good experience - makes you grow a little.

Kudos to the OpenOffice.org development team for giving me a really nice office suite that I'm happy to use ON MY MACINTOSH in the X11 environment!!!

and it's "Office Open XML"

[Foerstner]

Not OpenOffice XML. (When referring to Microsoft's proposed document format standard.)

Huge potential for confusion, and Slashdot's submitters/editors get it wrong half the time.

NeoOffice rocks.

[wheatwilliams]

NeoOffice is developed by a (very) small team of people who have worked very hard and acheived some wonderful results in the last year. The program has become much faster and more responsive. And it's quite Mac-like.

If you use it, please donate a couple of $10 bills to their efforts through PayPal on their web page. I've made several small donations to them over the past three years and I think it was money well spent.

Re:also of interest to mac users:

[m50d]

No, it really wouldn't be. If it was an actually good post which had been modded into oblivion by the GNAA, or worse, mac fanboys, who would see it to mod it up again?

Ditch the office reference

[recharged95]

Why does it need to be called office, now we've confused the average user: MS Office, OpenOffice, Neo/RetroOffice, XXXXOffice.

iWorks is no better. I don't want to be reminded about WORK by all these products when I'm using it at home.

TextEdit would be a great name.

Free software is never EOL.

[jbn-o]

This is one of the reasons I won't do business with Adobe or Apple; they, like many other proprietors before and after them, do not treat their customers properly by freeing obsoleted software so that the software can be improved and continued even after the proprietor decides not to distribute copies for a fee. I don't agree with distributing proprietary software, however I take a very different view of organizations that distribute software as proprietary and then free that program rather than choosing for that proprietary software to never became free. I understand that a version of FrameMaker will let you generate SGML files instead of FM's proprietary format. Perhaps those files will be more easily read than the proprietary FM format I recall dealing with years ago, giving users a chance at switching to something built on free software.

Apple, now embarking on their latest office suite, placed users in a similar situation with AppleWorks files. Hardware wise they sent the same message with the Apple Newton. I recall comparable issues around making bootable CDs for "old-world" PowerPC machines. People reverse engineer things and figure stuff out, but they shouldn't have to. With software that respects the user's freedom, any program can be shared and improved so long as there is the will to do the work.

OpenOffice for Aqua is already quite good

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a native Aqua version of OpenOffice in the works that is already very good. It is much faster than NeoOffice too. It can be downloaded from http://porting.openoffice.org/mac/download/aqua.ht ml and is already really good, even though the message on that page is a little scary. Anyway, I've downloaded it and am quite happy with it.

Re:OpenOffice for Aqua is already quite good

[Anonymous Coward]

The native Aqua snapshot yuo're using is fast because it's missing a lot of functionality - expect it to slow down considerably as it becomes more like the real thing...

LyX / LaTeX (was Re:too little, too late?)

[WillAdams]

Try LyX:

http://www.lyx.org/

William

Re:Congratulations.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, sometimes these even give me schadenboners. Not this one...

Native OpenOffice

[tyagiUK]

What will happen to NeoOffice when the OS X native version of OpenOffice is released?