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?

[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?

[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?

[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)

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.

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.

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.