Office Suite for Mac?

[tutubibi]

So here is my first post as a Mac user:

After a long, long wait I finaly switched and I am now a proud owner of iBook G4.
I used OpenOffice and KOffice on Linux and Windows before. Now that I am using Mac, I am looking for alternative.
I find MS Office too expensive, OpenOffice X11 for Mac is not there yet in terms of GUI (hopefully native Aqua version will come soon), AppleWorks is couple of years behind in everything. Don't get me wrong, both OO and AW are still usable and installed on my iBook right now, but somehow they don't feel quite right.
So, is any other alternative available for Mac? Preferably, open source and light in terms of disk and memory footprint.

Thanks in advance.

[gekko513]

So here is my first post as a Mac user:

After a long, long wait I finaly switched and I am now a proud owner on iBook G4.
I used OpenOffice and KOffice on Linux and Windows before. Now that I am using Mac, I am looking for alternative.
I find MS Office too expensive, OpenOffice X11 for Mac is not there yet in terms of GUI (hopefully native Aqua version will come soon), AppleWorks is couple of years behind in everything. Don't get me wrong, both OO and AW are still usable and installed on my iBook right now, but somehow they don't feel quite right.
So, is any other alternative available for Mac? Preferably, open source and light in terms of disk and memory footprint.

Thanks in advance.
You've covered most options except NeoOffice (http://www.neooffice.org/index.html) which is a prototype of an Aqua port of OpenOffice. You may give it a try.

[tutubibi]

Thanks, I will try NeoOffice later today.

Also, I found about ThinkFree (http://www.thinkfree.com) Office for Mac.
Anybody has any experience with it?

[ChrisFromCanada]

Just in case you didn't know TextEdit will open .doc files.

[tutubibi]

Just in case you didn't know TextEdit will open .doc files.

Thanks, didn't try that before.

However, my problem is creating new documents. I create maybe 50 documents (basic text, spreadsheet or presentation) a year. So being such a light user, I try to avoid paying (big) money for Office suite or sacrifice 1/2 GB of disk space for other alternatives.

I guess it's time to start new open source project: OSX Office Lite. Small, fully functional, native look and feel. Max disk footprint 99 MB. That would be :cool:

[AppleStrudle]

On a very similar note - I'm thinking of replacing my aging home Windows machine with a Mac. I suspect that AppleWorks can satisfy my private needs for wordprocessing etc. but occasionally I have to edit an MS Word document from work. Apple's marketing blurb for AppleWorks claims that it can work with MS WORD files. Does anyone have any experience of using AppleWorks or OpenOffice for this?

Thanks

[tutubibi]

On a very similar note - I'm thinking of replacing my aging home Windows machine with a Mac. I suspect that AppleWorks can satisfy my private needs for wordprocessing etc. but occasionally I have to edit an MS Word document from work. Apple's marketing blurb for AppleWorks claims that it can work with MS WORD files. Does anyone have any experience of using AppleWorks or OpenOffice for this?

Thanks

Both OpenOffice and AppleWorks can open and work with doc files from MS Word. Depending on complexity of the Word document there may be some formatting issues but it's ussualy very minor. I've been using OO for a long time (on Windows and Linux) and never had any major issue.
Also, file created and saved as "doc" from OO opens perfectly in Word (and it is ussualy half the size compared with same doc saved from Word later).

[aptmunich]

just here to remind everyone that you/ your kids can buy office for 150$ as an educational version if your a student..

Having said that i wrote my complete assignment for history last year in a combo of office xp, openoffice for windows and openoffice for linux after several annoying pc/officexp related bugs and that worked fine so you should be ok with oO

[tutubibi]

just here to remind everyone that you/ your kids can buy office for 150$ as an educational version if your a student..


IMHO, even 150$ is too much for something that should be commodity. It's just overpriced. I would rather spend that 150$ supporting 5 deserving open-source or shareware projects.

[hesitaliandad]

You've covered most options except NeoOffice (http://www.neooffice.org/index.html) which is a prototype of an Aqua port of OpenOffice. You may give it a try.

neooffice rules. i use it as my office suite, and i have never had any problems. i like it better than OO. it doesn't seem quite as clunky for some reason. go for that one.

[dvdh]

Not a full featured Office solution, but it does handle the word processing side of things well. BTW, their thesaurus is a really nice add-on to OSX . . . works system wide just like apple's spell check.

Nisus.com

[wordmunger]

I wrote about 2/3 of a book using OpenOffice. I recently gave up on it because of a few things: poor font support (yes I realize there's a way to access your Mac fonts from X11, but I don't have the time/inclination to mess with it), lack of cut and paste support between X11 apps and regular Mac apps, and printing problems with Airport/Rendezvous.

I just downloaded Neooffice, and I'm happy to report those issues are resolved. The font support still leaves a little to be desired (boldface and italic are not as pretty as they are in native Mac OS), but everything else works great. I think I'm going to switch permanently to NeoOffice. It will be even better once it uses the native Mac interface, but this is a great alternative to Micro$oft!

[7on]

yeah, I've wasted my money on MS Office. And I'm not buying another ;P (considering OfficeX will probably suite my needs until I die).