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NeoOffice? is it worth it?

Mr.Noisy

Mr.Noisy

macrumors 65816
Original poster
May 5, 2007
1,077
4
UK™
Hi, Ive got MS office installed on the Mac, but wondered if it was worth getting Neo Office (well it is free ;) ) , any input i.e. pro's & Cons against MS office would be good, only the wife is studying Biology and has a lot of work to do including bar charts and graphs plus a load of letters to do, would she find Neo Office more user friendly than MS Office ?

Tar in advance :)
 
Nah, except to support open standards. However Lotus Symphony may be good when it comes out this week...
 
I use Neo Office on my Macs and love it. It's free, for one. And with Microsoft constantly trying to get people to upgrade to their latest version of Office by refusing to support even their own older file formats, Neo Office can read and write seemingly anything. Also the new MS Office is ugly and blue.
 
Um... when you ask "Is NeoOffice worth it?"...

It's free, so yes, it's worth "it", I suppose.

Unless you think it's pointless software.
 
If you own Office stay with it. If you are planning on buying '08, then I think you may want to give Neo a try. I really like it. It works well with all the Word, Excel, and powerpoint files I have to use a work.
 
If you don't have MS Office, then NeoOffice is a great alternative. I use it and I've never found it lacking in anything I need to use. It's definitely worth it. The price is right.

But if you already have MS Office, there's not much point. It's not much user-friendlier than MS Office, I guess, so unless you're just swearing off Microsoft products or don't want to upgrade to '08/just upgraded and don't like '08, then you might as well stay with what you've got.
 
I concur...NeoOffice is fine if you don't have MS Office. But if you have MS Office you get nothing special from NeoOffice. BTW, I bought iWork 08...after playing with MS Office 2008 today I think I'm going to make the move. I really liked it...I'm a relatively new switcher and found Word much more intuitive than Pages...but that's probably to be expected. Not suggesting everyone will feel that way, but Word 2008 is pretty nice IMHO.
 
dringkor said:
I use Neo Office on my Macs and love it. It's free, for one. And with Microsoft constantly trying to get people to upgrade to their latest version of Office by refusing to support even their own older file formats, Neo Office can read and write seemingly anything. Also the new MS Office is ugly and blue.
Click to expand...

What? Microsoft isn't doing that. They already admitted that their code for opening the documents had flaws and that's the real reason they disabled opening older formats in Office 2007. In other words, they screwed users because they couldn't code, not because they wanted them to upgrade.

Also, it wouldn't make any sense to stop supporting older file formats in a newer version of Office to get users of older versions to upgrade. That would encourage them to stay with the current version, afraid that their multitude of documents will become unusable.

Also NeoOffice Mac is unimpressive compared to Office 2008. Although it's probably about the same as 2004 on Intel Macs, but 2004 is better on PowerPC Macs. NeoOffice's one advantage is its excellent file format support, as mentioned by many other posters--it can indeed read/write just about anything.

"Ugly and blue" is an interesting way to describe the Office 2007 interface, because the rest of Mac OS X is very similar in color scheme, as is NeoOffice.
 
m1ss1ontomars said:
What? Microsoft isn't doing that. They already admitted that their code for opening the documents had flaws and that's the real reason they disabled opening older formats in Office 2007. In other words, they screwed users because they couldn't code, not because they wanted them to upgrade.
Click to expand...
Is the code fixed now?
 
I don't know about NeoOffice, but the Mac version of OpenOffice.org is surprisingly good! That's worth a look if you need free office suite.

I'm using iWork -- it's no MS Office, but it's sufficient for my home needs. (Well, Keynote is killer, and in ways is ssupreror to PowerPoint).
 
If you have Office 2008, don't bother with NeoOffice. Office is definitely more user friendly and probably has a more complete feature set, although I haven't really done a detailed comparison in that aspect. Not to mention NeoOffice is quite sluggish, just stick to Office, you'll be happy.
 
DaveF said:
I don't know about NeoOffice, but the Mac version of OpenOffice.org is surprisingly good! That's worth a look if you need free office suite.

I'm using iWork -- it's no MS Office, but it's sufficient for my home needs. (Well, Keynote is killer, and in ways is ssupreror to PowerPoint).
Click to expand...

NeoOffice is a native OS X version of OpenOffice.org based on OpenOffice.org's code. NeoOffice's releases usually lag a few months behind OpenOffice.org's since they're reliant on their code, but having a native OS X application is worth it to me. It's a much more "Mac" application.

f1 said:
If you have Office 2008, don't bother with NeoOffice. Office is definitely more user friendly and probably has a more complete feature set, although I haven't really done a detailed comparison in that aspect. Not to mention NeoOffice is quite sluggish, just stick to Office, you'll be happy.
Click to expand...

Strange. NeoOffice has always been faster than MS Office for me. Especially since the old version of MS Office had to use Rosetta for us Intel users. I know MS Office '08 is supposed to be a Univerasal Binary, but I hear many users saying it runs even slower than the old version. Of course I also hear many say it runs faster, but with my luck, I'll stick to NeoOffice.
 
its free, sure it worth it.

Since you already have Office, then you probably won't use neooffice very much tho.
 
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