Native Mac alternatives to MS Office?

Viro

Viro

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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? ;)
 
Pages is rather text-oriented. You're looking for Keynote as a PowerPoint replacement, actually...
 
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.
 
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.
 
NeoOffice ist just OpenOffice plus Java plus Cocoa. It's not perfect yet. Doesn't feel like a Mac application at all.
 
I actually like OpenOffice and NeoOffice. I prefer NeoOffice since it is more Mac-ish in look and somewhat in feel. Sure, it's nothing like some of the commercial stuff out there that's more Mac-like in look-and-feel, but consider that this project has only been active in the past few years on the Mac. This wasn't even an option before, and Linux and Windows had it for much longer (OO.o actually looks and feels much better on those platforms right now).

Granted, OO.o uses X11 but that's a minor detail I can live with (especially having dealt with X Windows on Linux/*BSDs). They are supposed to be releasing a more Aqua-ish version of OO.o in the future....I just don't know how far off that future is. :rolleyes:
 
"more Aqua-ish" sounds as bad as the state of NeoOffice now. I hope they're going either Aqua - or stay where they are. You can change and tweak a lot of things, but unless it's a true OS X application using its UI features, I don't truly consider a port to be a full membership Mac application. I'm aware that there simply aren't enough coders on such a project and that it's difficult to do for such a big open source project, but from an end-user's point of view, "Mac-ish" just doesn't cut it.
 
fryke said:
"more Aqua-ish" sounds as bad as the state of NeoOffice now. I hope they're going either Aqua - or stay where they are. You can change and tweak a lot of things, but unless it's a true OS X application using its UI features, I don't truly consider a port to be a full membership Mac application. I'm aware that there simply aren't enough coders on such a project and that it's difficult to do for such a big open source project, but from an end-user's point of view, "Mac-ish" just doesn't cut it.
Click to expand...

But the choice is there, and that's good for everyone. For me, it's OpenOffice/NeoOffice. For someone else that doesn't prefer it, there are the multitude of other solutions. I'm just glad that I have the ablility to run an office suite that I run on my other platforms as well. :) I personally can live with these little niggles (that's what they are to me anyways :p).
 
People seem to miss the point about being *native* *Mac* applications. OpenOffice on X11 doesn't look or feel like a native X11 program. If I wanted to run OpenOffice, the Mac is probably the worst platform for it. That's the reason I have a Linux box.

NeoOffice is a slight improvement. It looks Aqua-ish, but it still tries to do things the Windows/Linux way. Where are the floating palettes? 2 - 3 tiered toolbars is not the Mac way of doing things.

I've used OpenOffice for years. This was already mentioned in the original post. If I truly wanted OpenOffice, I would run Linux. OpenOffice is slow w.r.t. large documents, it doesn't look or feel native on the Mac and to be honest the only thing it has going for it is the price.

The original post is an attempt to get peoples input on applications that are native to the Mac, but may perhaps be little known because others are quick to point out well known, bloated and less suitable alternatives. NeoOffice being the prime example. Sure it's free. But perhaps there are other tools out there that do not cost much, but do a far better job? I'm hoping that people will bring up lesser known applications, instead of rehashing the whole "use NeoOffice" meme.

Sorry. It's been a long day at work. I'll stop ranting now ;)
 
Lt Major Burns said:
i Hate neo Office/J. if i wanted to run linux, i would. i am not a fan of open source end-user software.
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I wouldn't go so far as to avoid all open source end user software. There are some examples of open source end-user software that is simply amazing.

The best example I can think off is Adium. This is an open source project, that makes full use of libgaim as its backend, which as some will know comes from a popular IM client on Linux (which is now ported over to various platforms). The approach the Adium team have taken is one that has to be applauded. Why? What makes Adium different from a project like OpenOffice?

Instead of trying to port an alien looking behemoth over to the Mac, they took the parts that were portable (i.e. the internals), and fashioned an interface to the app that is fitting for the Mac. As a result, Adium looks native, feels native, integrates bloody well into the OS, and still have a cross platform core. Other applications that provide a nice Mac interface, but are cross platform internally include TexShop, BibDesk and Skype.

IMHO, NeoOffice would be an interesting project if they completely did away with the OpenOffice UI, which frankly looks alien to the Mac. In its place, they should fashion an application that looks like it belongs on the Mac, integrates well with the Mac, and makes full use of the fact that it is running on the Mac. We don't need an application that tries to behave like a $YOUR_FAV_OS app on the Mac. We'd use $YOUR_FAV_OS for that....
 
Interesting idea for a thread, Viro. :)

I liked your brief reviews of the products you use, and was quite intrigued to hear you use Mellel. I only came across this fairly recently, but have never tried it.

I have a slight diversionary question, if you don't mind. The same company that makes Mellel, Sonny Software, makes Bookends, which you mentioned too. They talk of its integration with Mellel and offer a discount if you buy both together.

I've been an EndNote user for years, but haven't really used all its features, I have to admit. I'm using version 6, but of course they have now released version X... I'm a bit behind! EndNote does what I need most of the time, but I'm not too impressed with how buggy it has been over the years and how slow they have been to offer decent updates (and fix problems too...). I'm contemplating taking the leap to Bookends, as I keep reading good things about it, and I'm not over the moon about spending yet more money on an EndNote update. I was wondering if you've ever tried Bookends, especially as you have Mellel and are already an EndNote user.
 
There are actually 2 different companies making Mellel and Bookends.

A little background to my bibliography software experience. I've mainly used BibTeX managers, most recently Bibdesk. They're quite basic in function, allowing me to key in records, search for records, organize them via groups, and integrate them with LaTeX.

All these features are available in Bookends. In addition to that, it has much more filters than Bibdesk, allowing you to search various online libraries via an in app interface. My experience with Endnote is limited to Endnote 9, as that's what the university provided. Compared with Bookends, Endnote has more filters. However, in my experience, Endnote is buggy while Bookends is pretty good. Bookends hasn't crashed on me yet, while Endnote used to crash on average once a day.

However, to be honest I don't use enough of the advanced features in Endnote or Bookends to compare them. What convinced me to buy Bookends, was the tech and community support. I've already mentioned how Bookends has less filters than Endnote. One of the missing filters is for dealing with Zetoc, access to the British Library's Electronic Table of Contents. This is a major show stopper, as this is the source of *all* my references. I submitted an email concerning this filter, and within a day I received a reply containing a custom filter to connect to Zetoc. Not only that, I also tried to write my own filters for Zetoc's text files (this is what you get when you access Zetoc off campus), and the help I received was so prompt and invaluable that I managed to write my own filter. This clinched it for me. Bookends provides all the functionality I need, it may not provide all the features of Endnote, but the support is first rate. It is definitely worth buying for the support alone.

I suggest giving Bookends a try. The downloadable trial does not(!!) expire but it is limited to 50 references per library. That should be enough references for a moderate length paper and will give you a feel for the product. Of course, you could try to get around the limitation by having several libraries..... or you could just buy the full version :)
 
I've tried that. No need to go all *bold*... Still doesn't feel like a real Mac application.
 
My experience has been that some people don't get why there is a need for Mac applications to look and feel like native Mac applications. Call me picky, call me snobbish, but there is a reason I spent money on buying a Mac instead of running Linux. I sure don't want my Mac applications behaving as if it was running on Linux or Windows.

No, Aqua-fied monstrosity is still a monstrosity.
 
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