I used NeoOffice for several weeks as the main office suite on my Apple iMac. On MacBook Pro Microsoft Office for Mac was still present and used as a primary office suite. I decided to try to convert myself to a “bit different office suite†to make sure, I can use NeoOffice for my real work.
NeoOffice is a port of OpenOffice to Mac OS X. It is more customized to look and act as a real “Aqua†application. It needs Java for its running as it is a pure Java application. This solution brings several benefits for developers and some pains to the users of the suite.
Starting NeoOffice takes its time. You have to wait for quite a long time to see the first window of the application to be open. But after the application is ready to use, the speed of response is sufficient, mainly in text documents. In other parts of the application it can be a real pain for you.
But summarizing my own experience with NeoOffice:
- Writing documents – it is really suitable application for this tasks. It is fully compatible with MS Word 2007 (which was an issue for Mac users several weeks ago unsolved by Microsoft) and the response from the application is really quick. I had no issues with writing documents and I use just NeoOffice for this right now.
- Spreadsheets – as I am fully satisfied with writing documents, I still think, the spreadsheets part of NeoOffice is a joke. It is not useful for me at all. I had no patience to wait for the response from the application. It is really terribly slow and the differences from MS Excel are too big for me to cross them easily. But in case you just need to make your tables look good – then you have an option. In case, you need to conduct a complex analysis, you have to stay with MS Excel. As I did.
- Presentations – you will reach your goals, but it is slow again. In case you can use KeyNote, I fully recommend to go for it. For presentations, it is very similar to PowerPoint and sometimes, it takes a long time to get a good looking result. And you see all the objects redrawing and you can watch the page slowly evolving, which makes your work pretty slow. Go for Keynote, if you can.
This really does not mean that NeoOffice is not for a real work, you just have to make some compromises. For text documents I use just NeoOffice. But as a alternative to MS Excel – no way, still a long way ahead to make the application as a real competitor.
You will be completely satisfied user when you need to perform basic tasks. But NeoOffice is still not sufficient enough as a basic application for your home business. You would have to make many compromises to get things working smoothly.
Related Articles:
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- NeoOffice Calc: Quick Look
- NeoOffice Writer: I fully recommend
- NeoOffice Writer: First emotions
- NeoOffice Suite – First Impressions and what is in the box
- Should I take NeoOffice or MS Office?
- NeoOffice supports MS Office 2007 file format
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Just curious, what do you do with Spreadsheets?
For me, a basic spreadsheets user that uses them a lot, I find NeoOffice alright to use.
I use some basic formulas like IF but nothing too fancy.
“… as it is a pure Java application.”
That’s not quite right. About 95% of code is the same as of other versions of OpenOffice.org - C . NeoOffice uses mainly Java and additionally Carbon and Cocoa to get the software “native” in look and feel and to get it play nice with Mac OS X (file management, native fonts layout, printing etc.).