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#1
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| Native Mac alternatives to MS Office? After recently buying a Macbook (well, nearly 3 months now) I've been bitten by the lack of universal binary support for the applications I use. Among the most important applications I use, MS Office is still not a universal binary. Sure, Office 2007 will be a universal binary and it will be released some time next year. However, that would mean that for over a year, people who depend on MS Office would have had to run it in emulation on the Intel Macs. Frankly, this is unacceptable. Sure, Office runs "fine" under Rosetta. The performance you get can be comparable to running it on a 1.67 Ghz G4 processor. However, I didn't buy a new computer just to run my current applications at the same speed of my old computer. I might as well stick with my old computer for that! Some would suggest NeoOffice/OpenOffice. I've tried those, and I've used OpenOffice since build 638c on Linux way way back in 2002. Remembering the pain I went through during my undergraduate years, I've decided to give it a miss this time. Writing a doctoral thesis is stressful enough, and if paying a little money for good software saves me headache, I'm well up for it! With that in mind, I've been looking around at alternatives from the Mac shareware scene. To that end, I've found the following applications that work quite well as replacements for some MS Office applications. Word Processing
Spreadsheets
What I'm looking for is a nice Powerpoint like application. Perhaps I should give Pages a look, perhaps with iWork 07 is released. Any one have other suggestions? I have been quite impressed with the quality of shareware applications on the Mac. My reasons for going with smaller shareware applications, has been their quick implementation of universal binaries. While larger companies drag their feet in releasing universal binaries of their applications, the smaller companies have easily beat them to the punch. Another nice side effect of going with smaller applications, is the level of support I received. I've posted questions on the forums of Nisus, Mellel and Bookends, and I've had very prompt answers not only from the community but from the makers of the software as well. When was the last time a MS/Adobe programmer answered questions about their products? ![]() Last edited by Viro; November 19th, 2006 at 12:44 PM. |
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#2
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| Pages is rather text-oriented. You're looking for Keynote as a PowerPoint replacement, actually...
__________________ MacBook Air 13" 1.6 GHz, 2 GB RAM, 80 GB HD. Mac OS X 10.5.5 MacBook 13" 1.83 GHz, 2 GB RAM, 160 GB HD. Mac OS X 10.5.5 Hackintosh Core2Duo 2.4 GHz, 2 GB RAM, 160 GB HD. Mac OS X 10.5.5 iPhone 3G 16 GB (v2.1), AppleTV 1G 40 GB (v2.1) Mac user since 1987, Apple Product Professional 2007, 2008. |
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#3
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| Mellel is wonderful, it renders text so well, and its features make sense. It is worth the money certainly. I enjoy using it, and it does not have the overhead compared to Word. If you want an alternative to PowerPoint. Keynote is, in my opinion better than PowerPoint, and not Microsoft product. |
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#4
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| WriteRoom is a freeware, and while it isn't exactly a word processor, it's a great way to remove all distractions while writing.. http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/product/writeroom
__________________ Power to Burn. At speeds of up to 733MHz, The most powerful Mac in history burns CDs, burns DVDs, and burns Pentiums - apple website, oct 4, 1999. advertisement for the powermac g4 |
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#5
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| openoffice is nice, and has yet to give me any issues, where msoffice always has. maybe you should be asking for help on solving openoffice problems. either way, good luck on your big task.
__________________ Digital Audio G4/1.467ghz, 1.5gig ram, 16x Superdrive, 256mb DDR3 AGP 6800GS, zip, 2x500gig raid0 for 1tb on sonnet tempo trio, 10.5.4 |
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#7
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| NeoOffice ist just OpenOffice plus Java plus Cocoa. It's not perfect yet. Doesn't feel like a Mac application at all.
__________________ MacBook Air 13" 1.6 GHz, 2 GB RAM, 80 GB HD. Mac OS X 10.5.5 MacBook 13" 1.83 GHz, 2 GB RAM, 160 GB HD. Mac OS X 10.5.5 Hackintosh Core2Duo 2.4 GHz, 2 GB RAM, 160 GB HD. Mac OS X 10.5.5 iPhone 3G 16 GB (v2.1), AppleTV 1G 40 GB (v2.1) Mac user since 1987, Apple Product Professional 2007, 2008. |
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#8
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| i Hate neo Office/J. if i wanted to run linux, i would. i am not a fan of open source end-user software.
__________________ Dual 1.8GHz G5 2GB, 1TB, Radeon 9600XT 128MB, 10.5 20" Apple Cinema Display + Dell 2005FPW 20" dual-head iBook G3 700MHz 640MB, 40GB, Rage128 16MB, 10.4, dying battery |