Office Suites

If you need an office suite and have not tried OpenOffice.org or NeoOffice then you are missing out. NeoOffice just released version 2.1 final which is based on OpenOffice.org 2.1 and it rocks. Last fall I was using NeoOffice 2.0 beta which was based on OpenOffice.org 2.03 and it just was not up to par. So since I already use OpenOffice.org 2.1 in Linux and Windows, I installed OpenOffice.org 2.1 on my MacBook. The most negative thing about OpenOffice was that it has to run in X11 on Mac OS X. The native OpenOffice.org port for Mac OS X is still in progress.

Just yesterday (03/27/2007), NeoOffice 2.1 final (non-beta) was released. Since NeoOffice is a native Aqua application, I downloaded it and installed it over my previous NeoOffice 2.0 beta3 installation. My first impression is, wow! It works solidly and performance is significantly improved over the previous beta.

I have used it for spreadsheets, word processing, diagrams, and presentations and I can tell you that it does well in all categories. I have not tried the desktop database product but I am sure it works well. The bottom line is that I highly recommend that you use NeoOffice if you are a Mac user and do not have a need to run Microsoft Office. If you do use Microsoft Office on the Mac, then you might want to give NeoOffice a spin. It reads and writes all MS-Office formats with ease and more.

I now use NeoOffice 2.1 as my preferred office suite on my MacBook. It works great and has a lot of user-interface improvements over OpenOffice.org. It feels like native Mac OS X application and has all the capabilities of its OpenOffice.org roots.