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

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?

[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?

[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?

[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.