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?

[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?

[Bluesman]

Use LaTeX for research papers. Thank me later.

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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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: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

[bazorg]

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

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.

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...

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.

MLA package for LaTeX...

[bundaegi]

Is that any use?

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

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

[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!)

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

[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

[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.

iWork?

[Andrei D]

No, thanks. IWasteTimeOnSlashdot

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: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!!!

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.

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.