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?

[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?

[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: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)