After several days spent with NeoOffice, I can say, what I miss in the package to be fully satisfied user. I am satisfied, but really – not fully satisfied. I give 4 stars out of 5.
At the beginning, I have to congratulate to guys to make such a huge piece of software. Comparing their resources to the resources of Microsoft, I have to ask myself, what the hell the guys at Microsoft are doing in their office time. With the understanding behind, that OpenOffice and NeoOffice are copies of MS Office ideas – it is programmed with much less resources.
I found just several things, which were driving me crazy. The first most important issue to me was a spell check. It was working, then it was not working. It was hugely dependent on the setting of the original template of documents and when it was set correctly, that it should be US English, then everything started to work correctly. Without this, all the mistakes were checked and seen as fine results of typewriting.
The second issue were icons. They are not nice. But, this is just a standard setting. When you choose a different icon set and setting their size to be small, they look really nice. They are nicer than the icons in the original MS Office for Mac. But, after installing the alternative icon set, you will enjoy the beauty, when typing your documents.
I was a bit worried of the speed issue as it was reported many times. That NeoOffice is very slow to work with. Generally, with NeoOffice Writer – this is not definitely an issue. Just the launch of the application takes its time, but typing the documents is without any difficulties. The other applications suffer from the lack of speed. NeoOffice Calc can be sometimes a bit of pain to be used, but I will cover this in the next article.
Opening and saving documents in MS Word format is without issues, but I tried just the basic documents, without a lot of special formatting and objects inside the document. But for the common documents, it is very easy and stable solution and you can be sure to exchange the documents with other people around you. I had just one issue with the password protected document, which was to refused to open.
From the user interface point of view – it is a bit difficult for a true Mac OS X user to orientate quickly as you would naturally expect the items in the menu to be at different places, but you can get used to it.
By using NeoOffice Writer, you have nothing to loose. It is completely suitable for everyday job and you will hardly find a task, which cannot be done with NeoOffice. It supports almost all the functionalities of MS Word and you will not meet any “hot†situation.
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