After my happiness with NeoOffice Writer, I have to express my disappointment with NeoOffice Calc. The application has a long journey ahead to be useful and competitive application to MS Excel included Microsoft Office for Mac. The main issue is speed. NeoOffice Calc knows to be very slow and it can leave you a lot of time to think of next steps as you will wait for the reaction from the application.

NeoOffice is the open source competitor to MS Office for Mac. NeoOffice is based on OpenOffice project, which aims to develop multi-platform open source office solution. Currently, OpenOffice is provided for Linux and other Unix ports, Windows and Mac OS X. On Mac OS X OpenOffice needs X11 to be installed as it is not a native application. NeoOffice is a port of OpenOffice to Mac OS X and it uses a standard Aqua user interface and it looks more natural on the screen of your Apple computer.

NeoOffice Calc is the second application of the suite, which I try to use at least for several days to find out, whether NeoOffice can be a complete replacement of MS Office on my hard drive.

NeoOffice Calc positions itself as an application similar to MS Excel, providing analytical tools to the customers. Yes, MS Excel and NeoOffice Calc are not applications to make your tables look better and nicer.

What did I find out?

1. Prediction – it is a cool feature of MS Excel. You just start filling the numbers and by dragging, Excel automatically calculates the values in particular cells. NeoOffice Calc tries to make the same for you, but the logic is very different. I do not understand to it. When you make a row of numbers, where you want to add next values, it is not just a continuum of the row. Also, when you make a row of percents, like 10%, 20%, 30%… the next value is… 310%. So, for simple tasks, the prediction can be used, for a more difficult tasks, it is not still useful hint of the application.
2. Selecting cells - I do not know why, but selecting cells was an issue for me. Trying to select cell and to drag it… usually delivered different result for me as I was not able to select the cell correctly. I believe, it will be corrected soon.
3. Speed – NeoOffice Writer is quick enough to follow your work, NeoOffice Calc is very slow. You can see the screen redrawing and putting more difficult formulas is a pain. I think, the speed of the application is the biggest issue for the application to become a useful part of your office.
4. Graphs – I did not expect too much from this functionality, but it is really difficult to make the graphs according my expectations. Maybe, I want to much or my approach is too much Excel-driven. Also, making graphs is very slow and you have to wait to see changes happen. It is a huge area for the potential development of OpenOffice and NeoOffice.
5. Pivot Tables – oh, man. I really love them. I expected them to be implemented very easy way, but they are really complex and help to analyze huge portions of data.
6. Functions – I was pretty amazed by the number of supported functions in NeoOffice Calc. It knows all the functions I need – statistical, mathematical and those “look up functions”. I think for the common user, the set of predefined functions is fully compliant.

As I am a bit disappointed right now with NeoOffice Calc, I will still continue to use it. Maybe, it is me, who is doing something wrong. What is your experience with NeoOffice Calc?

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