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iWork vs MS Office vs NeoOffice vs OpenOffice (sheesh)

T

techmonkey

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jun 8, 2007
596
0
With so many options to choose, I am having trouble :)

NeoOffice, looks nice havent tried it, its free

OpenOffice, free, tried it on my Windows machine years back and it was very slow (java based), not sure about the Mac

MS Office, used it forever on Windows, use it at work, comfortable with it, dont want to pay for it on Mac

iWork, looks nice, tried the trial, not crazy about Numbers

I still have a windows machine with Office 2000 on it, so I would like to keep compatibility with Word and Excel.

Anyone else have any thoughts on this? Recommendations?
 
try neooffice so you give them all a fair chance.

It really does depend on what you need to do.
 
xUKHCx said:
try neooffice so you give them all a fair chance.

It really does depend on what you need to do.
Click to expand...

Couple of questions:

Is NeoOffice intel native?

Does it use Java like OpenOffice?

How is .xls and .doc compatibility?

I just did a fresh install of Leopard and need to install an Office app. I wish I would have tried NeoOffice and OpenOffice before I reinstalled.
 
It does use java, compatibility is good but it can be thrown sometimes.

What sort of things are you trying to achieve with an office suite?
 
xUKHCx said:
It does use java, compatibility is good but it can be thrown sometimes.

What sort of things are you trying to achieve with an office suite?
Click to expand...


Mainly for home use. I do some Word stuff like letters and envelopes and I use Excel for some financial things as well as simple layouts.
 
I like iWork the best. Numbers is a nice change from standard spreadsheet programs because I love having independent sheets on a page. It is so much more logical. I bet the next version of Excel copies it and Numbers copies Excel on things like Pivot tables and more speed. I am using Pages for everything now and feel better about it. Office and the Office clones are familiar to me from using Office for 15 years and that is the only advantage.
 
This has been brought up so many times before. Try the search feature.

I'll throw in my .02 anyway.

I use iWork. Used to use NeoOffice (exact same as OpenOffice.org, but native OS X) but finally decided iWork was worth the $79, which it really is. I don't like MS Office much, but it's necessary if you need complete 100% compatibility with other people using MS Office. Otherwise, NeoOffice offers good 99.9% compatibility with MS Office, and works good enough for most users. I've never experienced it to be slower than MS Office. But if you don't mind spending the money, I think iWork is very worth it. Everything is much easier to use and well integrated with OS X, and Keynote blows PowerPoint away, which is worth Numbers not quite being as strong as Excel yet.
 
I've tried iWork, but it was a little too hard to switch to it after using office for loooong long years(still have to use it at school and work). Ended up with grabbing an office 08 Student/teacher edition. Excel is great, and I use it the most.

Currently I am very happy with ms office. Neooffice was good enough as a short term measure but I simply cant imagine a computer without ms office.
 
I think the OP is in a middle ground where all three would probably do the job, depending on the spreadsheets (iWork may not be appropriate).

comes down to personal preference and which is most suited to the current workflow/existing documents.
 
I've done a LOT of work in Excel and I find Numbers much better. Numbers has a few niggling bugs but overall it Just Works. I don't like NeoOffice because it doesn't really look "mac-like" enough for me. Pages is better and faster than MS word.
 
Thanks for the replies and comments.

I know the subject pops up often, but I didnt find any recent one comparing the latest releases of all programs.
 
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