“Major milestones were recently announced for two Mac OS X-compatible software suites that could provide an alternative to the near-ubiquitous Microsoft Office. The free NeoOffice/J, an open-source software development project created by Patrick Luby and Edward Peterlin, has reached its ‘first stable release,’ and South Korea-based Haansoft has announced that it will ship a Mac OS X version of its ThinkFree Office 3.0 suite close on the heels of the July release of the Windows version,” Daniel Drew Turner reports for eWeek.
More info about NeoOffice/J: http://www.planamesa.com/neojava/en/index.php
More info about ThinkFree Office: http://www.thinkfree.com/
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Note: Also, note that Apple’s AppleWorks provides Microsoft Word and Excel compatibility and Apple’s Keynote (part of iWork) imports and exports Microsoft PowerPoint presentations. Apple’s Pages (also part of iWork) also imports and exports Microsoft Word documents. And Apple’s Filemaker also imports Microsoft Excel files and Access data and instantly converts Microsoft Excel files to FileMaker databases.
>There are many MS Word users who would love to dump Word for Pages,
Why?
>There are many MS Word users who would love to dump Word for Pages,
Why?
>There are many MS Word users who would love to dump Word for Pages,
Why?
I REALLY like Pages.
But..
It REALLY needs a serious update.
I’ve been using a free copy of Office 98 (for academics via a license our college’s library has) and I’ve been dying to use a non-Microsoft equivalent for my Powerpoint presentations. My problem is that if I buy now Keynote is a goer but Pages is not up to scratch.
I’ll wait for a Pages update and then buy iWork. Even though Appleworks converts Word documents I refuse to pay money for one app that is good and another that needs work.
As for Neo-Office the interface sucks, and when I imported a Powerpoint document I couldn’t work out how to turn the slide pages. In one word: YUK.
Mac & PC Guy asked “Why?”
Word, Pages and most word processors work fine for simple documents (letters, text-only documents, etc.). At the moment, Word is the only choice for complex ones. As part of my job I write NIH grant applications – long documents (30,000 words, 50 pages) with many embedded images. One of the biggest problems Word has is with the images. In Word, a minor edit can cause the images to jump to different pages and throw off the pagination in the whole document. Word has strange ways of handling page numbers. The worst thing about Word is that it fights with me, constantly trying to change styles and reformat things. To be fair, Word has many excellent features too. I like the outlining view (but it only works correctly if the styles are named according to Word’s conventions ??) and Word handles fonts much better than the stupid font menu in Pages. But why can’t I customize a button in Word to “paste unformatted text” like I can in Excel? I’ve grown accustomed to these and other “quirks” in Word – a program that hasn’t changed substantially since 1998. But I would like to have something better. Unfortunately, no other alternative is quite there.
Many (all?) of my colleagues have the same complaints about Word (and have for years) but have no alternative. I was hoping that Pages, which is a cross between a word processor and a page layout program would be better for documents with embedded images, but it lacks other critical features.
Check out the link in the Bookends forum in the earlier post to see what others say about Word.