Alternative office suites for OS X

Viro

Viro

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I know there's MS Office for the Mac, but I'm trying to stay away as far as possible from MS products. From what I've heard, Office 2004 is slower than Office v.X for the Mac, and that's another incentive to not go down this route.

So, I know there's AppleWorks which was originally clarisworks. I've used this before and it doesn't seem to be very feature full, and its compatibility with MS Office is rather poor.

Then theres ThinkFree office, which is a rather nice product but it runs a little slow and it doesn't look like its been updated in a while. Dead?

Openoffice and Neooffice are both free. But they're slow and don't integrate nicely with the rest of OS X. They are really the last resort.

Does anyone know of other alternative office suites for the Mac? Apart from the standard functionality, I need something that reads/write MS Office files reliably.
 
Mesa will read/write excel files.
Try nissus writer for word docs.
Keynote does powerpoint files.
 
Koffice as part of KDE... it's not a joke to install, but it seems quite well done.
 
Viro said:
Does anyone know of other alternative office suites for the Mac? Apart from the standard functionality, I need something that reads/write MS Office files reliably.
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Unfortunately, therein lies the rub. Even Office for the Mac is not 100% compatible with Office for Windows. But if that is your main criteria go with Office
 
OOo stands for OpenOffice.org (Free, Open Source)

Just bought my first Mac today, a G4 PowerBook, and love it. I'm a Unix admin by trade to I'm finding the switch very painless.

OpenOffice is great, works on many platforms. I've been using it for years on Linux and Solaris. Has no problem with M$ files...

PLUS IT'S OPEN SOURCE!
 
OOo is 'not enough' for many Mac users, because its integration with Mac applications and the system is a bit, well, lacking. If it's the functionality you want and you're using X11 often anyway, go with OOo, I say, but for look & feel it doesn't cut it just yet. I guess we'll have to wait for a real port of OOo 2.x to Mac OS X to see a much better version that cuts it for Mac users.
 
fryke said:
OOo is 'not enough' for many Mac users, because its integration with Mac applications and the system is a bit, well, lacking. If it's the functionality you want and you're using X11 often anyway, go with OOo, I say, but for look & feel it doesn't cut it just yet. I guess we'll have to wait for a real port of OOo 2.x to Mac OS X to see a much better version that cuts it for Mac users.
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Yes, you are quite correct. The look and feel of OOo does not come close to the Mac standard. I see that now as I learn to used my new computer. I guess I'm too used to the ugly X11 interface. On Unix machines (at least in the past) Function was EVERYTHING and things like ease-of-use, and aesthetics where completely ignored... Apple has definitely broken that status quoe with os X.

That said, OOo does "work" and I personally love to support open source projects.
 
OpenOffice and NeoOffice not only don't look like native mac applications, they don't integrate well. The most annoying thing is, they don't support cutting and pasting (!!) from non X11 apps. NeoOffice is slightly better in this regard, but its huge, and its slow.

My iBook can't handle NeoOffice well, since it only has 384 MB of RAM and I do loads of things in the background, apart from word processing.

I might just pony up the cash for Office, since I see a few copies of Office v.X going rather cheaply on ebay.
 
If you find OOo to be too slow on your current OS, there is always an option to install Yellodog Linux on your mac. and in there you can emulate a Mac environment with MOL. Open Office runs wonderfully in there. If you're looking for an easier solution, I would recomend Appleworks. Not as robust as MS but functional non the less. You can import and export MS Files from there very easily.
 
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