A while ago, I wrote a post about my attempt to use Open Office to replace Microsoft Office, in advance of moving from a PC laptop to an iMac. I was looking for an open source alternative to Microsoft, as I couldn’t afford to re-buy all my old software.
On the whole, Open Office was good and on a personal basis was a viable alternative to Microsoft. The problems I had with it were that I couldn’t use it effectively for doing some of my work stuff; it didn’t like some of my Excel documents and was no good with the Access databases that I needed to work with. That really scuppered any chances of being able to use Open Office at work.
When I moved to the Mac, one of the first things I did was to download Open Office. To run on the Mac, Open Office requires something called X11, which is an extra part of the OS X system. OK, so I loaded that. Everything worked fine, but it seemed an inelegant solution. Open Office are working on Open Office Aqua for the Mac, which doesn’t require X11, but as it was described as currently being “very beta” I decided against it.
A Google search for “Open Office for Mac” directed me to NeoOffice. Using Open Office as a base, NeoOffice is a development for Mac that does not require X11 but is a stable release. Excellent; downloaded it, installed it, got rid of Open Office.
And there it stayed for the last few weeks. While I had it available, I didn’t actually need to use it. One thing I did notice with both Open Office and NeoOffice was that – when printing to my HP Photosmart 7762 – the top margin got ignored. Very annoying.
Then, a couple of days ago, I saw this post on Slashdot, saying that the latest release of NeoOffice was available. And guess what? All my problems are solved – it prints the top margin, it will open those big Excel sheets from work in five minutes instead of 20, it will keep the graphs when I re-save in Excel format and it’s more closely integrated with native OS X functionality like Dictionary. All-in-all, it’s brilliant.
If you use a Mac and you want something to replace Microsoft Office (and iWork doesn’t really cut it for you) then check out NeoOffice. You won’t be disappointed.
