Alternatives to Office X?

[macktheknife]

Does anyone have any experience with office suite software programs other than Office X? I already have Office X, but it runs fairly slowly that I'm considering cheap, third-party software programs like ThinkFree Office and OpenOSX Office. Any opinions? Does anybody have any experience with either program?

 

[iGav]

I have Office X as well...... haven't used it once yet....... I seem to PDF everything directly from Indesign..... has replaced my need to ever use Word again...... actually I don't use Excel of Powerpoint either........

Have you considered Appleworks??? not tried it personally... but people I know who do use it, swear by it.......

Just a thought!!!

 

[Geert]

Ever thought about Appleworks.
Best Office suite look a like on the market.
And it's faster, easier to use (once you get used to 'not think like M$ office) and complete.

 

[macktheknife]

Re: Appleworks

Thanks for the tip! Yeah, Appleworks does seem nice, but I'm looking to try something totally new (trying to support 3rd party vendors). The price doesn't seem to hefty ($79 seems reasonable), and the features sounds cool, so I will definitely consider it. However, I still want to hear it from anyone who has used ThinkFree or OpenOSX Office.

 

[alex_ant]

I've never used OpenOffice for OS X, but I've used the StarOffice 6.0 beta (which is based off of OpenOffice) for Linux. I liked it. It never crashed on me in about 50 total hours of usage, I didn't notice any shocking bugs, and it was free. OpenOffice for OS X, though, runs only under XDarwin (the OS X X11 server), as far as I know, which means that it looks ugly (a gray appearance rather than an Aqua appearance). It's pretty full-featured, though. It did everything I needed it to do. Which is not very much, but...

I use AppleWorks as my "office suite." (Actually I only use the word processor part of it.) It's alright. It has some problems, like not-completely-Aqua word processing windows, no mouse scroll wheel support, windows sometimes stretch off the bottom of the screen when you open them making them difficult to resize, somewhat ugly Carbon fonts, buggy lists, and an interface that is a bit strange at first. It has only crashed on me in OS 9, though - never in OS X (and I've used it 100x more in OS X). It is also quite lightweight. I would recommend it. I may be mistaken but I think it's $30 if you can get the educational discount.

Alex

 

[mmmdreg]

I hear they're trying to get OpenOffice out of xdarwin and into the normal OSX...And isnt OpenOffice jsut the dev version thats been released? I've got no problems with Appleworks though...just that it cant make powerPoints for school...BTW, I'm a musician and was around the school music department when I overheard a conversation between the Director of Music and some other student...the Director was saying how Macs were much better with the music software such as Sibelius at school but the school has some doctrine thing going where they refuse to buy Macs anymore...this seems to be because all of the crappy macs of pre-imac gave a bad reputation but now the school PC's are superoutdated and are giving them a bad reputation...I also saw the school techies having trouble configuring a windows server so yeah...shows the mistake they made when they lost the Macs..

 

[G4scott]

Two words. Apple Works.

As opposed to the oxymoron, microsoft works.

Word is too expensive, and with its licensing, my family would have to spend over $2000 dollars to get it installed on all the computers because we're all on a network, and their piracy preventer sucks.

Now, i could get it for $5 at a local college, but then I have to sign my life away to ms...

 

[j763]

Appleworks $uck$ @$$...

It's the worst program that apple have ever made... not that they can't technically make a good office suite, the fact is that politically they can't make a good office suite. I've messed around with the OOorg 638 build and it's alright -- it does need some work though. The situation at the moment is that the Aqua version isn't building for some damned reason, printing doesn't work and saving doesn't work. The guys at OOorg are well aware of all of this and are working on it. Hopefully, they can give us OOorg 1.0 aquafied soon but this requires the apple dev community supporting the OOorg mac port.

 

[James.Paul]

Why not stop looking for an office package and look at seperate applications. There is some very interesting products currently in development or released and native cocoa as well. Daylite www.marketcircle.com is stunning as a contact manager with tons of features such as sales forecasting. If you get in now they have an introductory price of $85. I use OmniGraffle for diagramming $60 , www.omnigroup.com which is superb, I use Mesa for spreadsheet work when needed www.plsys.co.uk/mesa.htm thats another $60. For word processing look at Okito Composer, this is currently in development, quite a way to go but it looks clean and is very promising www.okito.net . It will have many features that Word does with future releases including compatibility with word files. No pricing yet. I have dumped Office and gone with these applications, granted I am not inb a position where I need Word compatibility but for a user who is looking for alternatives, these are very good and offer a lot of potential. Also you can educational discounts on these which is comparable.