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

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?

[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?

[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: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 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: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.

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.

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: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...