Neo Office

Firtstly sorry if this is the wrong place for this question but:

Has/does anyone use neo office (i think thats whta its called) i have heard of it: am i right by saying it is a free version (obviously nowhere near as good) of microsoft office for mac. Will it do me until i purchase iWork (i am going to be getting it when they release there new versopn of it)

or is there another free version i cold use which is better?/


Thanks

Adam

Why don't you just download and try it ? It's free I use it most days. I don't use iWork as the trial period ran out. It may not look as good as office but It works for the things I need it for

ajlwoody said:

Firtstly sorry if this is the wrong place for this question but:

Has/does anyone use neo office (i think thats whta its called) i have heard of it: am i right by saying it is a free version (obviously nowhere near as good) of microsoft office for mac. Will it do me until i purchase iWork (i am going to be getting it when they release there new versopn of it)

or is there another free version i cold use which is better?/


Thanks

Adam

Click to expand...

Yep, NeoOffice is free, it's powerful and I like it better than MS Office for the Mac (I have both installed, but find myself using NeoOffice far more often - it performs better and I much prefer the user interface).

Just because software is free, doesn't mean it's not as good or better than commercial software. Also, iWork is not an office suite like NeoOffice or MS Office.

Actually NeoOffice (a port of OpenOffice) is a very good office suite. Yes, it is free. Microsoft themselves acknowledge that there isn't much difference between MS Office and OpenOffice. NeoOffice will handle things a little differently than the MS versions, but not much. NeoOffice's version of Word doesn't have a grammar check, sadly, but it does just about everything else Word does. I use NeoOffice and it gets the job done well for me.

I'd recommend it

ajlwoody said:

...(obviously nowhere near as good) of microsoft office for mac.

Click to expand...

NeoOffice is every bit as good as MS Office, and less bogged down with bloaty features you'll never even know about, let alone use. As already stated, just download and try it.

Neo Office and Pages

Actually, I did a comparison of Pages and Neo Office and found I like pages better than both MS Office AND Pages. Ms Office is expensive, and I HATE the new Office 2007 for Windows. It's really messed up. Pages is a GREAT program, but it's simply more than I need. I just write letters and other text docs, so I don't need to do a lot with graphics. I say, if you're going to be doing pamphlets, newsletters, or other graphics-intensive work: get Pages. Otherwise, Neo Office should be good. One other bonus is the Neo Office is MUCH better at importing and exporting to MS WORD formats. For example, pages will import and export to Word's .doc format, but it gets the margins, line spacing, tabs and other stuff wrong. Neo Office doesn't get it perfect either, but it gets a lot closer to the original than Pages does.

Also, Neo Office's website says that there's still a bug that prevents Neo Office from printing above 300 dpi. This is NOT a problem. I printed photos and other full-page (A4) graphics and I saw no difference between prints by iwork Pages and Neo Office (at least not on an HP deskjet 990 cxi printer).

Ok, thanks for all your helpfull replies.

There are actually some very big differences between Neo Office and Office System 2007. For most individual users however, the differences really aren't that noticeable.

If you don't share files with anyone, Neo Office will most likely suffice just fine.

D R said:

There are actually some very big differences between Neo Office and Office System 2007. For most individual users however, the differences really aren't that noticeable.

If you don't share files with anyone, Neo Office will most likely suffice just fine.

Click to expand...

Why wouldn't you be able to share files? NeoOffice both reads and writes MS Office document types.

Thanks for pointing out an obvious problem with what I wrote. What I meant to say is that Neo Office is not absolutely compatible with MS office files. There are formating and functions that don't come over. For example, I have a file created in Excel 2003 with additive functions. These totals do not show up in Neo Office.
The last time I tried it out was over a year ago. Perhaps those types of issues are much better now. Not that it matters, but I used Open Office and it was on a Windows machine.

For a free program NeoOffice sounds quite good!! I am still going to purchase iWork though when it comes out...but for now NeoOffice it is!!