If you're looking for a cheap Office alternative for the Mac that isn't from Apple (damn the man!), go ahead and give this one a try.Office Suite names that are on a light purple background are discontinued. Speaking of iWork: there is no way to exchange documents directly between iWork and NeoOffice: you'll have to save documents in Word or PowerPoint format for now, until iWork starts supporting OpenDocument too. Memory use is on par with Apple's iWork applications (unless you run both Pages and Keynote at the same time, in which case, Apple is much worse), but the Apple apps are significantly faster. I found the speed and memory use very reasonable for such a big cross-platform application. And NeoOffice's look is very much inspired by Microsoft Office. But if you're one to complain about UI consistency, you may be less than impressed by by the look and little things, such as the way the home and end keys on the keyboard behave like they do on a PC (or a Microsoft application). This Aqua version is a far cry from early X11 StarOffice ports that looked like they were running on Windows 98, prehistoric save dialogs and all. But that doesn't mean there aren't any downsides. AdvertisementĪll in all, this is a highly-recommended download. The default format for saving documents is now OpenDocument, with support for the new Microsoft Word 2007. Word documents (and older Star/NeoOffice documents) open just fine, with only a minimum of lost or changed formatting, and I really like the way you can use spreadsheet-like formulas in tables in text documents. Additionally, NeoOffice supports most, if not all, features expected from a full-fledged word processor. As far as I know, this makes NeoOffice the only word processor on the Mac (other than Word itself) that allows collaboration with Word users using the "track changes" feature. This feature has been greatly improved since the StarOffice 5.0 days: tracked changes now survive the conversion to and from Word's. With this, it's possible for several people to work on a text document, and then later see exactly who made which changes. My main reason to stick with StarOffice at that time was because it supported the "track changes" feature also found in Microsoft Word to some degree. I've written the better part of a book in StarOffice 5.0 under Windows some six years ago (I had yet to buy my first Mac.), which wasn't an altogether pleasant experience. Last but certainly not least, there's the word processor. When trying to "organize macros" it lists four types: NeoOffice Basic, Python, Beanshell, and JavaScript macros. However, it does look like NeoOffice is supposed to support Visual Basic macros. Reports from the forum point in the same direction. Only one of my spreadsheets had a (four-line) VBA macro in it, which didn't work. I had no trouble opening any of them, but I can't really judge whether anything was lost in the conversion. It seems like Excel is the lifeblood of bureaucratic organizations, so whenever I interact with one of those, I gain a few XLS documents. I was surprised to see how many Excel documents are hiding in the corners of my hard drive. Converting presentations from Keynote to PowerPoint format and then opening them in NeoOffice does lose some information, but presentations survive the conversion mostly intact. There's nothing really wrong with this part of the suite, except that I've been using Keynote for some years now and there's just no comparison. The presentation program works well enough, although it's pretty slow on my 1.25GHz G4 PowerBook. I haven't looked at the database yet, and as someone who is of the opinion that no good drawing program has been released since 1994, I'll apply the "if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything" doctrine to that part of the suite. NeoOffice includes a word processor, a spreadsheet, a presentation program, a vector drawing program, and a database. With "free" meaning both as in beer and as in speech: the license is the GPL, so you get the source, and you don't pay for it either. A few days ago, Planamesa released version 2.1 of NeoOffice, the Aquafied incarnation of the free OpenOffice productivity software suite.
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