Best office for os x

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Just curious on which office client people prefer and why.

I have used iwork 09, office for mac 2008 and openoffice 3.1, and out of them all, i prefer OpenOffice, because it is free, compatible (to an extent) with Microsoft Office, has the least bugs and rarely crashes.

iWork 09 has serious compatibility problems with docx and the spell checker was very selective on what it picked up. Office for mac 2009 just sucked overall, confusing layout, slow, buggy and lacked a lot of features.
 
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NeoOffice

I use NeoOffice. Also free. The NeoOffice developers edit the latest OpenOffice source code to make it seem more native to OS X. So NeoOffice is basically a more OSX-native version of OpenOffice. So NeoOffice is my favorite. As far as I know, the latest version of NeoOffice is 3.0, based on OpenOffice.org 3.1.
 
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Depends on your use of the application I guess. For college and university students, Office is nearly a must as some of the lecturers at a number of institutions get their underwear in a knot insisting attachments be only in Word/Excel/PowerPoint format.

For general users whatever fills their needs but personally am a MS Office user.
 

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I use to use MS office exclusively for school. I switched because it would take forever for MS word to launch.

Pages launches almost immediately.
 
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Openoffice guy here.
 
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I've tried them all and I use a hybrid of Office 2008 and iWork 09. For me, Pages is more useful as a publishing tool, so I use that when the need arises. I use Office for most of my needs, especially for class notes and other documents. Finally, I use Keynote for presentations as it's simply easier to use and much flashier than Powerpoint. I remember the last time I gave a Keynote presentation, everybody was blown away by the transitions.
 
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When I needed a compatible Office suite I used NeoOffice.
Now I call the shots and only use iWork '09. :)
 

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For most of my work I use iWork. It does everything I need an office suite to do at least for me. I do keep Open Office installed for some problem documents and spreadsheets just in case.

I have Office 2004 on my PowerMac G4 but rarely need to use it since the latest version of iWork and OpenOffice seem quite compatible with most everything out there.
 

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I have Office 2004 on my PowerMac G4 but rarely need to use it since the latest version of iWork and OpenOffice seem quite compatible with most everything out there.
Last I heard, OOo struggled with Office Open XML documents (Office 2007/2008 format). Is this still the case? How is iWork 09 with them?
 
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I use iWork '09 for Pages and Keynote. I do have Office 2004 installed on my Mac because I used that primarily before I switched to iWork. Office on Mac doesn't work very well in general, and it takes forever to launch. I find that formatting on Words to be a pain, which is why I switched to iWork in the first place.

As someone has already mentioned, Keynote is the ONLY way to give a presentation. Every single time I plug my Macbook into the school's projector, I will invite a slew of questions as to how I made the slides. And as for Pages, it'd say that functionality wise it is as good as Words in terms of basic word processing needs.

I'd say keep Office around if you do need it to open files that cannot be opened on iWork. Though, even docx and pptx can be opened with iWork, so I don't see the issue with compatibility for the most part.
 
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I use iWork and Think Free Office and sometimes Neo Office. Think Free is
100 % MS Office compatible and works and looks like ms office.
 
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I use NeoOffice. Also free. The NeoOffice developers edit the latest OpenOffice source code to make it seem more native to OS X. So NeoOffice is basically a more OSX-native version of OpenOffice. So NeoOffice is my favorite. As far as I know, the latest version of NeoOffice is 3.0, based on OpenOffice.org 3.1.

I use NeoOffice and OpenOffice, but NeoOffice is more stable, which is critical in time sensitive work. I occasionally use iWork 08.

Also, NeoOffice 3.0 is based on OpenOffice 3.0, not 3.1. There will be an update soon that will be based on 3.1.
 
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For college and university students, Office is nearly a must as some of the lecturers at a number of institutions get their underwear in a knot insisting attachments be only in Word/Excel/PowerPoint format.

Yep. That's how I got into it. Bought a 3-license package to share. Once that was installed, it didn't make sense to pay for iWork.

But, Office 2004 is buggy. I only use Word and Excel. I wonder how seamless a transition to OpenOffice or NeoOffice would be for all of my .doc and .xls files. It was a pain to convert everything from AppleWorks to Word and Excel.

Plus, will I be able to share the OO or NO files with someone who just has Word and Excel (whether on a Mac or with the Windows versions)?
 
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todd51

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Well, since I'm fresh out of school I still have MS Office 2008. As most of you have mentioned, you pretty much have to use MS when your a college student. When I first got my Mac, my parents bought me MS Office so I never gave Pages and Keynote a chance. Now that I'm out of school I think I'll buy them and try them out.

I use to use MS office exclusively for school. I switched because it would take forever for MS word to launch.

Pages launches almost immediately.

This is immediately a selling point for me. I HATE how long it takes to open up any MS Office application. I thought 2008 would help fix it, but it seems to take just as long as 2004 did.
 

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Well, since I'm fresh out of school I still have MS Office 2008. As most of you have mentioned, you pretty much have to use MS when your a college student. When I first got my Mac, my parents bought me MS Office so I never gave Pages and Keynote a chance. Now that I'm out of school I think I'll buy them and try them out.



This is immediately a selling point for me. I HATE how long it takes to open up any MS Office application. I thought 2008 would help fix it, but it seems to take just as long as 2004 did.

I really loath MS Office 2008 because of how long it took to launch the application. I would have to type in text edit while I wait for MS word to finish launching.

Now I just click on pages and start typing almost right away.
 
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todd51

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I really loath MS Office 2008 because of how long it took to launch the application. I would have to type in text edit while I wait for MS word to finish launching.

Now I just click on pages and start typing almost right away.

Yea, I'm definitely going to downloading the 30 day trial when I get home from work this evening. I'll test it out for a week or so and decide if I want to buy it. I used to have the trial version of iWork 06 that came with my Tiger install, but I never tried it or decided to purchase it.
 

chscag

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I really loath MS Office 2008 because of how long it took to launch the application. I would have to type in text edit while I wait for MS word to finish launching.

Now I just click on pages and start typing almost right away.

Must be your machine. My Office 2008 opens almost immediately whether it's from a blank document startup or an already existing document. I like Pages because of its publisher abilities but not as a WP. Biggest drawback of Pages is that it will not save to *.DOC by default. Has to be reset each time.

Regards.
 
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roadbloc
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I use NeoOffice. Also free. The NeoOffice developers edit the latest OpenOffice source code to make it seem more native to OS X. So NeoOffice is basically a more OSX-native version of OpenOffice. So NeoOffice is my favorite. As far as I know, the latest version of NeoOffice is 3.0, based on OpenOffice.org 3.1.

hmmm... neooffice eh? i may give that a spin, openoffice is a little rusty a times...
 

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