NeoOffice - Word track changes incompatibility

[jahbug]

Hi all NeoOffice users-

With a few (but puzzlingly not all) of my colleagues who use MS Word for mac, we have major problems with track changes compatibility.

Using Neo Office, I am able to receive their MS word .doc authored files just fine, can view their track changes, etc. But when I then edit and send the file back to them, they cannot view track changes at all. The way it appears to them is how it looks when you have "show changes" unselected. In other words, it looks as if all changes have been accepted. And furthermore, the menu option to track changes is greyed out for them in MS Word (2008 for mac).

Has anyone else experienced this problem, and has anyone found a solution? I really don't want to load MS Word on my machine, but will have to if I can's sort out workable alternative that has working track changes functionality.

thanks for any help

cheers
bug

 

[r0k]

I would try LibreOffice which is AFAIK more recently updated than NeoOffice or OpenOffice.Org. I try to avoid loading MS Office on our Macs as well. Some of us use iWork but all of our Macs have LibreOffice (or OpenOffice) installed. I just checked and it seems NeoOffice now has version 3.2.1 which supports Lion features. Are you running the latest version? When I've had compatability issues with MS file formats, I've found that upgrading to the latest version of whatever I'm using at the time (NeoOffice/OpenOffice/LibreOffice) often solves the problem.

 

[miles01110]

I don't see why you'd take the chance. Office 2011 is the only version of Office that will be fully compatible with another person using Track Changes in Office 2011 (although Word 2010 compatibility is pretty good too).

 

[jahbug]

Thanks for your replies.

My reluctance to put Office on my machine is that is is a space hog and I determined a long time ago (way back when I had a pre-G3 Apple laptop) that MS Office was definitively the cause of frequent computer crashes. I guess I have always had a policy of no MS Office since then, although I wouldn't be surprised if their stability on Macs has improved. I also try to go with open source alternatives whenever possible.

I am not yet running Lion (10.6.5 right now).

I will try LibreOffice, and repost to this thread with the results.

cheers
bug