Enough of MS Office...want to replace it

[Halcyon]

I've had it with MS Office and want to replace it.

Should I stick with Pages, Keynote and Numbers from Apple?
Should I go with some open source software?
Maybe NeoOffice or Open Office?
Any other options?

Unfortunately, maximum compatibility with MS Office is a must in decision making.

TIA

 

[eji]

I'd love to ditch Office on account of Spaces issues and fairly routine crashes, but I've found significant compatibility problems with Pages.

I edit scientific manuscripts on occasion. They come to me as Word .doc files and for a time I was importing them into Pages for editing rather than using Word.

When dealing with small capital letters, for instance, Pages will retain the correct formatting, but when it re-exports to .doc or .rtf, the formatting will be lost. This even happens with basic formating like bold and italics -- it will appear as bold or italics in the exported document, but it will not be marked as such.

So as much as I'd love to recommend Pages and use it myself in place of Word, I think you might have to give iWork a miss and go with one of the open source alternatives. That should help narrow down your choices.

 

[BarryS]

NeoOffice AND iWork.

What's wrong with iWork AND NeoOffice? That's what I do, and I keep TextEdit docked for when I need to open/create files in a hurry. iWork is cheaper than Office and is really beautiful and user friendly. It got me interested in much more creative use of documents, spread sheets and presentations. Seeing as NeoOffice is free (though I think it would be appropriate to take up the option make a small PayPal donation) it won't harm you to have it in your application folder. I don't dock it but I do use it when I need to open something/create something as close to Word formatting as possible. Pages can be exported as a Word doc and then that can be opened with NeoOffice for turning Pages publications into fully formatted Word documents. The time spent on this is small and worthwhile in comparison to the labour behind important documents, and gives the chance for another stage of editing/checking content. As has been pointed out before when Office vs iWork has been debated, formatting is not completely preserved between different instances of Word anyway. So just exporting Pages as a .doc file may not be much of a disadvantage in that case.

 

[tersono]

Like BarryS, I've been using a mixture of iWork and NeoOffice (OpenOffice Aqua now - the current beta is very well behaved).

However, if your real need is for a direct MS Office replacement and you need bullet-proof word/excel compatibility, then NeoOffice/OpenOffice will likely do all you need - certainly, as I work in a Windows/MS Office environment, OpenOffice is what I find myself using 90% of the time - Pages/Numbers have just too many little formatting glitches when importing/exporting MS files.

 

[BarryS]

OpenOffice beta bled on my Mac

It's good to know that Tersono had a good experience with the Open Office beta. I tried it very briefly recently. It bled black and white fog over my screen, which I partly cured by putting my MacBook to sleep, but only fully cured by rebooting. I deleted OO from my applications folder pretty quickly after that. Bleeding colours not generally a problem on my Mac (running Leopard 5.3)

 

[Halcyon]

Thanks for your input guys.

Being that maximum compatibility with MS Word is required, it seems that NeoOffice/OpenOffice is the way to go. I'm a power user of other applications and only employ word processors for the most elementary tasks, so bell and whistles are not a priority, but nice to have.

I'm downloading NeoOffice right now, will give it a try and will most definitely place my donation if it fulfills the expectations.

Thanks again.

 

[exegete77]

I have used both NeoOffice and OpenOffice, now in Beta 3. OO Beta 3 is very stable and works well. I have edited MS Word 2004 documents and MS Word 2007 documents with no problems. Also, both have some support for VBA, which MS Office 2008 does not.