28 May 2007

"The Best Macintosh Office Suite Money Can't Buy"

For Macintosh users, there is an office suite option that is both compatible with Microsoft Office and very affordable.

The cost is $0.00 and it's freely downloadable.

This office suite is NeoOffice, which is described on Wikipedia as:
" ... a fork of the free/open source OpenOffice.org office suite that is ported to Mac OS X. It implements nearly all of the features of the corresponding OpenOffice.org version, including a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation program, and graphics program. It is developed by Planamesa Software, and uses Java technology to integrate OpenOffice.org — originally developed for Solaris and Linux — with the Aqua interface of Mac OS X."
Unlike the existing version of OpenOffice suite for the Macintosh, NeoOffice does not require the X11 windowing system and it has the expected look and feel of Aqua interface applications on Mac OS X.

Check out this online review of NeoOffice from InformationWeek magazine.

The magazine reviewer does suggest that the $400.00 you save by not buying Microsoft Office for your Mac could be used for buying an iPhone instead.

3 comments:

jfield said...

I've generally found that I prefer the openoffice.org version to the NeoOfficeJ version. The Java version always seemed a little slow and I already had X11 installed for other reasons.

Steve Caldwell said...

I installed NeoOffice on my daughter's college student Mac OS X laptop so she could work with Microsoft Office documents.

Although I had a student/teacher version of Mac OS X Office, it would not install on her Intel CPU Macbook. I didn't want to use a program with a non-Aqua interface. And her X11 software was not available for us to use as well (it was in her dorm room).

The Aqua version of OpenOffice is still in pre-release development according to OpenOffice web site:

Aqua Pre-Release Version
Currently there is no public pre-release version of the Aqua version of OpenOffice.org. We now have a list of 10 major issues that need to be fixed. Once we have these issues fixed, we will release a alpha-version for testing purposes only. Please check back on this page and on the download pages in the next 1-2 months, when we should have a pre-release alpha available.

If you want to see what it is like right now, you can build your own OpenOffice.org Aqua.

If want to help us, please contact the Mac Port Team.

The best way to keep up with the Mac Port for Aqua is to read the blogs of the Mac Port developers. Important news will be made available in the news section.

http://porting.openoffice.org/mac/faq/aqua-prerelease/index.html

Shaun McDonald said...

Expect an aqua alpha in the next few weeks ;-)