Mac Tales

Today I will show you a fantastic OS X alternative to MS Office. Before switching to mac I was a little concerned about how I would edit word processor documents and excel spreadsheets.

OSX 10.4 comes with trial versions of iWork and MS Office 2004. I haven’t looked at iWork yet, but I did take a quick look at MS Office 2004 (I say a quick look – I uninstalled it after about ten minutes).

Introducing NeoOffice.

NeoOffice, based on OpenOffice, is designed and built for OSX. It works very nicely in the OS X environment, general use and tool placement is familiar and intuitive - decidedly more so than Office 2004.

The version of NeoOffice I’m using is NeoOffice 2.1 patch 0, which apparently includes some recent improvements that make the product significantly faster than OpenOffice on OS X.

Now – I’ve always thought that Word and Excel offer far more features than I’ll ever use – so I figure I’m unlikely to feel like I’m missing out on MS Office while using NeoOffice.

I’m not planning on writing any complex structured documents in the next few months (I’m on holiday), but I am drafting this post using NeoOffice right now. So far I can report that NeoOffice has been 100% rock solid.

I’ve also opened spreadsheets that were created using Office 2003, in NeoOffice Calc – again nothing fancy, but it coped just fine.

So in short, if you’re like me and use probably 5% of what word has to offer (and probably less than 1% of Excel), then NeoOffice might well be worth a look.

Do you have experience with NeoOffice, or other office products on the mac?