Best Open Source MS Office 2008 Alternative

[Eidorian]

I'm testing Office 2010. Now if I could only get the installer to work. I'll look into it when I get off of work.

 

[Luba]

So no chance of coming out to Boston any time soon.

What about Microsoft Office Live Workspace? I am looking for something so I can read .docx files. Do a little modification here and there, but mostly to be able to read Office documents.

It's back-to-school season, so watch retailers to see if they've got a good price. I just checked Amazon, and they've got the Home and Student Edition for $100 as of this split second. There's usually more back-to-school specials as the summer wears on, too.

If you're a university student or work for a large company, check to see if you can get Office for less than retail. Microsoft has a Home Use Program that lots of companies and schools take part in, and it's pretty inexpensive.

If you're in either the San Francisco Bay Area or the Seattle area, you can sign up to take part in usability studies. In exchange for an hour or two of your time, you can get a copy of Office 2008 (or other hardware/software from Microsoft), plus you get to see a glimpse of the future of the suite and help shape it. (We do conduct usability studies elsewhere, but the vast majority is in our offices so that the app teams have the opportunity to observe it. )

Regards,
Nadyne.

 

[McGiord]

The latest OpenOffice for Mac is much better than NeoOffice, it's provided by Sun Microsystems.
For a free office suite it is excellent.
Other alternative is to use google docs.

 

[exegete77]

The latest OpenOffice for Mac is much better than NeoOffice, it's provided by Sun Microsystems.

Well, sort of. OpenOffice on Mac does not properly handle Hebrew (or any RTL language), but NeoOffice does handle it properly. So for someone like me NeoOffice is better. And NeoOffice has two developers that are very responsive. Getting changes on OpenOffice is about as likely as getting changes on MS Office.

 

[exegete77]

If you're in either the San Francisco Bay Area or the Seattle area, you can sign up to take part in usability studies. In exchange for an hour or two of your time, you can get a copy of Office 2008 (or other hardware/software from Microsoft), plus you get to see a glimpse of the future of the suite and help shape it. (We do conduct usability studies elsewhere, but the vast majority is in our offices so that the app teams have the opportunity to observe it. )

Regards,
Nadyne.

Howdy, Nadyne. You know, there are places outside SF/Sea that have tech companies and universities, as well as many interested individuals. We could use those kinds of usability studies in KC, St. Louis, Minneapolis, etc. I'd be happy to travel to one of those sites.

 

[GreatDrok]

All i needed Neo Office to do was upload their version of a .doc resume to Monster and there was all sorts of formatting problem. Unfixable imo.

I'm saving up for Office 2008.

Is the new Open Office any better?

If you're seeing all sorts of formatting problems then that is because you don't know how to use a word processor and you would see formatting errors any time you shared your docs even with other Office users.

You need to use styles and formatting properly. If you do this, then it is possible to share docs between programs and formatting will be fine. It won't be identical because you're not using a desktop publishing app but the layout engine will be able to format the document so it looks good on the page.

If you need to guarantee that a document will look exactly the way you want you need to use a format like PDF which completely describes the layout. MS Office doc format doesn't do this as it relies on behaviour of the layout engine to finish the job. You may find that page breaks shift but assuming you have used styles the changes will still result in a good legible document.

I have lost count of how many times people have sent me documents where they have simply used tabs or worse spaces to adjust the layout. It may look OK on their screen but it isn't going to be portable and will look terrible when printed. I've even had trouble sharing Word docs with a Windows user because she used an empty box image which Word on Windows uses to replace a font it doesn't have so when she sent it to me there was all sorts of garbage since my Mac had more fonts. I edited the document to include an actual box graphic and sent it back to her and she wigged out because it looked fine on her machine. Even pointing her at a MS page describing what she was seeing wouldn't convince her.

The vast majority of people using MS Office have no idea how to use it properly.

 

[j_maddison]

If you're seeing all sorts of formatting problems then that is because you don't know how to use a word processor and you would see formatting errors any time you shared your docs even with other Office users.

You need to use styles and formatting properly. If you do this, then it is possible to share docs between programs and formatting will be fine. It won't be identical because you're not using a desktop publishing app but the layout engine will be able to format the document so it looks good on the page.

If you need to guarantee that a document will look exactly the way you want you need to use a format like PDF which completely describes the layout. MS Office doc format doesn't do this as it relies on behaviour of the layout engine to finish the job. You may find that page breaks shift but assuming you have used styles the changes will still result in a good legible document.

I have lost count of how many times people have sent me documents where they have simply used tabs or worse spaces to adjust the layout. It may look OK on their screen but it isn't going to be portable and will look terrible when printed. I've even had trouble sharing Word docs with a Windows user because she used an empty box image which Word on Windows uses to replace a font it doesn't have so when she sent it to me there was all sorts of garbage since my Mac had more fonts. I edited the document to include an actual box graphic and sent it back to her and she wigged out because it looked fine on her machine. Even pointing her at a MS page describing what she was seeing wouldn't convince her.

The vast majority of people using MS Office have no idea how to use it properly.

I think that's accurate description with some solid advice there. I've made those mistakes my self in the past, what your saying certainly rings true for me. I know I'm guilty as charged!

I've also had friends who have moaned that the mac causes them problems with word processing, when wo and behold the same issues happen on different versions of word! There's a big assumption that if it looks good on my screen it should look exactly the same on someone else's, which isn't always the case.

 

[nadyne]

Howdy, Nadyne. You know, there are places outside SF/Sea that have tech companies and universities, as well as many interested individuals. We could use those kinds of usability studies in KC, St. Louis, Minneapolis, etc. I'd be happy to travel to one of those sites.

Yup, I totally understand that. Read the link in the part of the post that you quoted, that's a blog post that I wrote where I talk about exactly why we do the majority of our research in our offices. We do travel to do research, but for the day-to-day stuff, it's done here to minimise my downtime and so the rest of the application teams can observe real users using our apps.

If you are in my area (or the Seattle area), my user research team is putting in lots of work right now, so this is a great time to sign up to participate.

Regards,
Nadyne.