MS Office, Openoffice, iWork or AppleWorks?

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AppleWorks is no longer bundled with the software so that brings the choice down to MS Office, Oo.o or iWork.

The only one which is free there is Oo.o. There are other freebies out there which won't give you the potential headaches that Oo.o might, due to it needing X11 to run. AbiWord and NeoOffice are better options in the freebie catagory - with my personal vote going to NeoOffice.

I can't really comment of iWork or MSOffice as I haven't really had any experience with using them, although I do have the trial of it on my iMac C2Duo. It's the trial part of it which has stopped me from actually trying it~!
 
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i use MS Office.

please search this has been asked many times before.
 
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Neooffice for sure, its free and runs perfect, and its free. Basically MS Office but for free.
 
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You may also wish to try Google Apps. See:

http://www.google.com/a/

I understand that it is $50/year, but that is a very small fee.

If you are just looking for MS-Word and MS-Excel equivalents, check out Abiword and gnumeric. Both are open source and free. Abiword is available at www.abisource.com. gnumeric is available via darwinports (http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/).

Abiword has a direct Mac OS X port, so you can just download and go. gnumeric is an X11 program, and so you need to install X11, then install the darwinports program and then build gnumeric. It sounds worse to do than it is.

Both programs read and write Microsoft Office formatted files and both support a MUCH more space efficient native format as well. Both programs are real speed demons compared to Office or NeoOffice. gnumeric is a 99% complete clone of MS-Excel. For the most part, using gnumeric is transparent vs. using MS-Excel.

BTW, both programs are available for all of Mac OS X (although you have to do the darwinports dipsy-doodle for gnumeric), Windows and Linux.
 
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I use iwork but if you need a spreadsheet you'll want to use something else. I really like iwork for simplicity and slick wordprocessing features. Also comes with Keynote for great looking powerpoint type presentations, slideshows, charts, tables, etc. Choose carefully according to your personal needs though.
 
M

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Rumours say that the next version of iWork will have a spreadsheet included in the suite...
 
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Yea! I'm anxious for iwork 07. Hope it comes out soon.
 
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HKphotographer -- I use MS Office because I need password protection compatibility and document mark-up capabilities to share drafts with other people in my company. Neither of those functions are available in NeoOffice, OpenOffice, etc.
 
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I have iWork '06 on my Macbook but I dont find it as powerful as Office. Rather than buying Office Mac i just use office 2007 for windows on bootcamp. I have never been satisfied with the free word processing apps.
 
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I've tried NeoOffice, OpenOffice, iWork, and Office 2004 on my Mac. I personally don't like how OpenOffice looks, though that problem is solved with NeoOffice. The only problem with these two is that they seem to take a while to load and once they do, they don't seem to be very polished.

Office 2004 works just as well as its Windows counterpart. I have the same issue as with the other two suites, it takes a while to load. However, this one is much more polished and is easier to use because I'm so used to Office. Plus, the Student version makes it very affordable. I will definitely be upgrading to Office 2008 when it comes out because it should load faster since it will run natively rather than under Rosetta.

Finally, iWork. This is the program I use 90% of the time. I use it to take notes in class and to write my papers. It loads very quickly and is a piece of cake to work with.

The only time I use Office is when I need to look at Word documents with lots of formatting or if I need to use Excel since iWork doesn't come with a spreadsheet program...yet.

Since you're switching soon, I would suggest checking out NeoOffice, Office 2004, and iWork. The last two come with trial versions on all new Macs (don't be put off by the word trial, they're fully functional and the trial lasts for a pretty long time).
 
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I have downloaded and installed OpenOffice because I don't want to spend on OfficeMac 2004 but the documents it produces are not compatible with MS Office. Hence, I have to buy Office Mac. There is no point of having a free software if it works in isolation.
 
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You may also wish to consider Thinkfree Office (www.thinkfree.com) which is a free web based suite. They claim to be MS-Office compatible.
 
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Is Neo Office MS Word compatible?
Mostly yes.
The next version, 2.1 coming out later this month (March 27th), will support MS Office 2007 documents:
  • Opening, editing, and saving of Microsoft Office 2007 Word documents
  • Execution of Visual Basic for Applications macros in Excel documents
  • Support for linear programming extensions for spreadsheets
Neo Office, as mentioned before is Open Office, ported to Cocoa (No X11 needed).
It was interesting to watch it evolve. It started out as NeoOffice J...Open Office using Java for the interface, etc.
That is no longer the case.

For my Windows using friends, I always suggest OpenOffice. For Mac users, always NeoOffice.
 

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