Freeware of the Moment: NeoOffice for Mac
I’m sticking with Microsoft Office 2004 on my Mac for now, but for the rest of you, take a look at NeoOffice. Information Week has a full review of the free Office suite for Mac OS X 10.3 or better. Before the "but I can run OpenOffice for free" comments, let me explain that NeoOffice is essentially a port of OpenOffice at its core; the difference is that NeoOffice is Mac-like in appearance thanks to the Aqua interface.
Included in the free productivity suite is:
- Writer, a word processor that includes support for Word 2007 docs
- Calc for spreadsheets including support for Excel macros
- Impress for presentations
- Base, a database tool
- Draw for….uh….drawing.
I specifically mentioned the support for Excel macros since it’s been reported that Microsoft is dropping VBA support in Office 2008 for Mac; if true, that’s a real shame and will disappoint power-users of Office. Those same folks will find plenty to like in NeoOffice however; I’m blown away with how much the app looks and feels like the traditional Office Suite!
Over the weekend, I started dabbling with Google Docs as a free productivity app, but I’m still a little leery of housing my important info on-line. With NeoOffice, you can use a free office suite, but still keep all of your data local; the best of both worlds. You always have the option of storing any data you want on-line through a number of free and pay-for storage sites.
Again, I purchased Office 2004 for Mac; my reliance on a hosted Exchange server working with Entourage far outweighs a free suite for me personally since I’m in e-mail much more than I’m in docs or spreadsheets. How about you?
NeoOffice is pretty cool. I use it on my iMac, and use OpenOffice on the apartment laptop.
However, one place it falls down severely (as does OpenOffice, which it is based off of) is tracking changes. You don’t get MS Office’s pretty bubbles you can stick wherever you want near a change; you only get footnotes and nearly-unusable notes that you can’t see unless you do a rain dance. (Unless I’m a fool and doing something wrong.)
Then again, you can’t beat Free. Well, you can, but no one pays you to use software.
Oh, one more thing. The new NeoOffice 2.1 looks waaaaaaay better than the previous version. They made it Pwetty(tm).
I use both. Entourage for Exchange access and NeoOffice for Excel and Word files etc. I only drop back to Microsoft Excel/Word if there is file that doesn’t behave righ in NeoOffice (which to be honest, isn’t that often). I find NeoOffice runs faster on a MBP then MSO 2004.