Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Thrash911

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Sep 14, 2006
297
4
Jutland, Denmark
I used the spreadsheet thing in OpenOffice in Windows XP. I have tried OO for Mac. But it uses something called X11.. I feel that OO runs rather slow in OS X. I guess it is because it runs via this X11 thing, yes?

Then there is Office 2004 from Microsoft, but I don't know... What Office thing do you guys use? Any recommendations?

EDIT: Just found out.. NeoOffice sounds nice. No X11 dependencies.. :)
 
I use excel. It's just what I know and what I like. However, I did just find a problem with Word on a Mac that is actually bothersome to me. I know this is about excel, but I had to share. ;)
 
Thanks for all your input.. I'm going with NeoOffice for now. I noticed that it is still in Beta though, so I'll have to be a little careful. If something bad happens, I'll go with Excel.
 
NeoOffice is in beta for its latest release, but this isn't the first release...you should be fine. But I also use Excel 2004 because I think it's a very nice program.
 
I just use Excel with Office v.X 2004 / Rosetta. It runs fine on my iMac Core 2 Duo with 2 GB RAM, which kind of amazed me since the last time I tried it was when the Intels were first released and it was horribly slow, it looks like Apple have been working hard on Rosetta.
 
I've been reluctant to use anything but Excel for a long time... the last vestige of being a Windows user, I suppose (even though I haven't been one for over 1.5 years.)

This thread got me thinking though... I recently began using Pages for all of my assignments (college;) it looks better on my monitor and isn't crapped up with all kinds of menus and toolbars and whatnot (Inspector rules!) I use Keynote for class presentations (even though they have to be converted to PPT so I can use them on my professors' computers, and it ruins the beauty of it all.)

I created a spreadsheet in Excel about a year ago; I was spending way too much of my loans too soon and not realizing it, which caused some horrible money problems. Tonight, I opened up Pages, created a table, and got it all set up. It looks much nicer than Excel, and was so much easier to use (especially my equations; very easy to set up.) Plus, my iMac has the stock 512MB of RAM; Rosetta is impressive and all, but my computer takes some time to open PPC apps, and sometimes takes too long to modify things once opened.

I suppose it probably depends on your needs; if you've got to swap files with other people all the time, or have some heavy-duty uses, Excel or OpenOffice/NeoOffice would probably be better. If it's for personal things, I'd just use Pages. Truly great (and I was a real Pages skeptic up until about 6 weeks ago.)
 
My employer insists on doing a schedule I need as a spreadsheet. This is the only time I need a spreadsheet program and even then all I really need is a viewer - I don't need to make changes or manipulate the document in any way. I found that google has online spreadsheet service. It doesn't work with Safari (of course) but it does work with Firefox and I think you could probably do almost anything you needed to do without getting a spreadsheet program at all.
 
I use Google SpreadSheet, but I never really need it(I have some stuff about school but nothing important) Also have AppleWorks for spreadsheets(just incase I need a spreadsheet and my internet is down) , but NeoOffice(the new one) is looking very nice.


If tables was free I'd use it(looks like it goes well with iWork, but with free apps that do the same thing, an how little I use it, I can't bring my self to buy it

Link to tables http://www.applelinks.com/index.php/more/tables_the_new_spreadsheet_for_mac_os_x_shareware_beat/
Also here are some other one could use http://www.pure-mac.com/spreadsheet.html
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.