Native Mac alternatives to MS Office?

**Viro** · November 19th, 2006, 12:39 PM

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

Nissus Writer Express. This is quite a barebones word processor, and will appeal to people who need a word processor without all the overhead of MS Word or OpenOffice Writer. I tried it for a bit, but it wasn't really what I needed. It doesn't do auto captions for things like figures/tables, for example. At $50, I felt it's a little expensive for what it provides.
Mellel. This is my current word processor. I was using MS Word as a replacement to LaTeX. My thesis is slowly growing in length, and as it gets more and more cluttered with LaTeX commands, the entire thing gets totally unreadable. Mellel fits the bill of "academic word processor" very very nicely. The biggest feature, is outlining. I can actually rearrange my entire thesis in outline mode just by dragging section titles about. But what makes it really really cool, is the fact that it costs $50 for a normal license, and $35 for a education license. If you're a student writing academic papers, you'll need a bibliography software to go with that. Mellel can be purchased with a bibliographic software (Bookends) for under $100, which is a real bargain considering that's half of what I have to pay for Endnote alone. Oh, did I forget to mention that it loads up a 200+ page document, loaded with images in under 4 seconds on my Macbook? Try doing that with MS Word *shudder*.

In all the programs above, I've found that MS Word compatibility is better in Nisus Writer Express. Mellel seems to be quite poor at importing MS Word documents. If MS Word compatibility is truly important to you, I'm afraid you're still gonna be stuck with MS Word for Mac as that provides the best compatibility. On the other hand, if you're just interested in writing documents for yourself, and then sharing the finished result with others, Mellel and Nisus are good alternatives. Write in them, and send the PDFs to others.

Spreadsheets

Mesa is a fairly nice looking spreadsheet application. It seems to do what I need of a spreadsheet (i.e. loading up text files and plotting graphs of those). I don't do much numerical calculations with spreadsheets, as I prefer to use something like R or Matlab for that. Excel compatibility is alright, as I can import excel documents and the graphs and layout turn out alright. I imagine there will be issues with complicated Excel documents that rely on macros and the more esoteric Excel commands, since Mesa doesn't implement macros and it doesn't provide full compatibility with all Excel commands. At $39 ($35 for students), it's a fairly cheap product and works pretty good.

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?

**fryke** · November 19th, 2006, 12:57 PM

Pages is rather text-oriented. You're looking for Keynote as a PowerPoint replacement, actually...

**powermac** · November 19th, 2006, 04:48 PM

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.

**eric2006** · November 19th, 2006, 05:28 PM

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

**sinclair_tm** · November 19th, 2006, 11:39 PM

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.