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NeoOffice 2.2.1 Available For Mac
Posted by
kdawson
on Sun Aug 26, 2007 10:31 PM
from the closer-to-the-platform dept.
from the closer-to-the-platform dept.
VValdo writes "Following a month or so of their Early Access Program, NeoOffice, the free Office suite for OS X, has just released NeoOffice 2.2.1. New features include support for the native Mac OS X spell-checker and address book; support for high-resolution printing (more than the 300 dpi that previous versions allowed); the ability to open, edit, and save most Microsoft Office 2007 Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents; and the latest features from OpenOffice.org 2.2.1, which is the code base for NeoOffice. X11 is not required, but for those of you who actually want to use X11, check out the new RetroOffice."
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too little, too late? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:too little, too late? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:too little, too late? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:too little, too late? (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:too little, too late? (Score:5, Informative)
I use TeXShop [uoregon.edu] for all of my LaTeX needs. It's not just a LaTeX editor, but also contains an easy-to-use environment to create PDFs on the fly. It is also bundled with a graphical BiBTeX editor to store bibliographies. Way better than the command-line tools that I've used on my old FreeBSD machine :).
As for LaTeX tutorials, I use "The Not So Short Introduction to LaTeX 2E." It's a very good tutorial that will get you started working with LaTeX code. I use LaTeX for all of my research papers except for those that employ the MLA format (LaTeX was designed for scientists and mathematicians, not keeping English and history majors in mind. But sometimes a science/math student needs to write an English paper, and I haven't been satisfied with existing MLA themes for LaTeX). If you must use MLA, just stick with Word.
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where is it? (Score:2)
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Re:too little, too late? (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.lyx.org/ [lyx.org]
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Re:too little, too late? (Score:5, Interesting)
Finally, I opened the document in OpenOffice and was able to easily fix all of the problems with margins and footnotes and I printed the final copies from OpenOffice. It would have saved me a lot of time to have started the project in OpenOffice.
Parent
For writing papers, check out Mellel (Score:4, Interesting)
I use Mellel [redlers.com] for papers and the like. If the thing you're writing is highly structured (wich chapters and footnotes and endnotes and citations), nothing beats Mellel, in my opinion. It's small, cheap, fast, and does everything you would want, easily. Rearrange chapters? Drag and drop them in the outline. Change the font of all second level chapters? Easy. Multiple languages? No problem, even mixing rtl and ltr.
I know I sound like a shill, but I'm actually a paying customer and have no ties - financial or otherwise - to the company making Mellel. Check the app out. It's one of the reasons I use a Mac.
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Mellel is fast, intuitive, powerfully adaptive, well-supported and affordable. The cream of the crop in indy OS X word processors.
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Yeah, because only math and engineering students do research...do you honestly think the average medical student (for instance) is using LaTeX for their research papers?
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No, but they should be.
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Your average medical student doesn't need to write equations... to them, equations are HOLY THINGS which no one should ever handle. Once an equation is established it is like a HOLY TRUTH.
All the mathematics they will ever need in their papers are the (holy) p values (which has to be less than 0.05 --- a threshold which gives their results the status of HOLY TRUTH).
\end{flamebait}
Post anonymous to continue to get medical treatments...
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Re:too little, too late? (Score:4, Informative)
After purchasing my MacBook last year (I was previously a Windows and *nix user, now my Mac is my sole computer), I tried (and eventually purchased iWork 06. I love Keynote (I bought it solely for Keynote, in fact) and believe that Keynote > PowerPoint > OO Impress, but I'm just not really into Pages no matter how many times I've used it. I like the concepts of styles and use LaTeX for all of my non-MLA papers, but whenever writing any other type of document, I prefer the more "free" structure of Word/OO Writer/AbiWord/etc. to Pages's strict enforcement of styles. My biggest problem with iWork (don't know about iWork 2008, however) is its very imperfect compatibility with MS Office file formats. The basics are correct, but anything that requires tables, exact layout, more complex styles, etc. starts to look jarbled. So, I like iWork a lot (much speedier than MS Office 2004 due to my having an Intel Mac, not to mention cheaper [$49 vs $149 for students]), but for perfect compatibility, I don't trust it.
I've also tried NeoOffice on my machine. As stated earlier, I vastly prefer Writer to Pages. NeoOffice was a necessity to me because of its spreadsheet (iWork 06 doesn't have a spreadsheet; that changed with iWork 08; I still need to try it). NeoOffice's compatibility with MS Office documents is superb, and I use NeoOffice to open and save documents where compatibility is very important. However, my complaint with NeoOffice is its speed (it is dog slow on my 1.83GHz Core Duo MacBook with 512MB RAM, but I plan on upgrading to 2GB). The fact that the widgets are non-native and fake-looking do not add to the problem, either.
Personally, I'm waiting for MS Office 2008 to come out (finally a native version for Intel Macs). However, if iWork 08 is a major improvement with compatibility, or if NeoOffice makes big improvements with speed and its interface, then I might not have to shell out the cash.
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Re:too little, too late? (Score:5, Interesting)
I think Pages has been and is misrepresented as a word processor. It's really a page-design and layout tool. Rather than "Apple's word processor" I think of it as "Indesign lite".
Keynote, of course, stomps Powerpoint in almost every possible way.
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I've read this (that Pages is not a word processor) in articles and on Slashdot. However, Apple still categorizes (misrepresents?) Pages as a "word processor":
Re:too little, too late? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd gladly buy it if it supported ODF. But if I'm going with something other than MS Office, it's at least going to use open standards that the rest of the world is migrating to. Seriously, the iWorks formats have all the lock-in of Office but none of the ubiquity. What's the point in that?
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Re:too little, too late? (Score:5, Insightful)
How is that a troll? I don't want proprietary formats, and I just don't see the logic in creating new ones when ODF pretty much has word processing covered. If I were OK with proprietary formats, I'd chose the one that 95% of the population uses, not one that will only let me interact with a small subset of users of a still relatively little-used OS. I have a Mac and I wouldn't hesitate to buy iWork if it didn't mean being locked in yet again.
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Re:too little, too late? (Score:5, Informative)
Seriously, the iWorks formats have all the lock-in of Office but none of the ubiquity.
The huge difference between the iWorks formats and Office formats is that the iWorks formats are sane and well documented XML:
[apple.com]http://developer.apple.com/documentation/AppleAppl ications/Conceptual/iWork2-0_XML/Chapter02/chapter _2_section_4.html [apple.com]
So, while it's true that iWorks is the only real option for editing them now, it shouldn't be too hard to convert them in the future - you can probably get them into ODF with some simple scripts, or potentially even simple XSL transforms.
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this cures the symptoms but not the disease (Score:4, Interesting)
What it doesn't do is answer the basic question of why we need another set of document formats. We've heard this story before and we've always hated it. However, I'd love to hear from Apple about why TextEdit in Leopard supports ODF and iWork does not.
It's useful to know that Apple has kept the iWork file formats well-documented so far. Given that, there's a chance that NeoOffice will eventually read and write iWork files, and there's a chance that iWork will read and write ODF. We can always hope for both, of course.
If you're happy enough to waste your time converting documents backwards and forwards, feel free to do it again. I'd rather not encourage this sort of behaviour, personally. Eventually, someone else will work around the problem for you, so that when you have to put up with this sort of nonsense, you probably won't even notice. Hey, it's happened before.
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What it doesn't do is answer the basic question of why we need another set of document formats. We've heard this story before and we've always hated it. However, I'd love to hear from Apple about why TextEdit in Leopard supports ODF and iWork does not.
My guess is that iWork does stuff that is not currently defined in the ODF format. My hope is that the commission that is in charge of ODF will extend it to support everything available in iWork. (Those slide transitions in the iWork presentation software are pretty freakin' cool!)
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I had been looking for something a bit less of an eventual dead end. OpenOffice/NeoOffice certainly has similar features - OO Draw is superb (but they need to fix tiling on printout), and the DB looks even more capable than ApplWorks DB. Not only that it works on Macs, Windows and Linux
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Just out of curiosity, does iworks grok ODF? There's also the price point, but either way I intend to check them both out on my macbook and see which gives me more bang for the buck.
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However, as many of people who use OO.o all the time in other OSes, I need ODF support. Apple is in bed with Microsoft in this one (even supporting Microsoft ego driven ISO screwing), so sorry Jobs, not this time. And all my supported Mac boxes (both PowerPC and Intel ones)
Numbers not up to scratch yet, plus no encryption (Score:3, Informative)
Others have mentioned ODF, but there's also password-protection missing from iWork. There's ways round of it course - you can cr
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Torrent? (Score:2)
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Not that slow - I just got it down from between 300KBs and 1.7MBs. Took a grand total of about 5 minutes.
Neo Office (Score:2)
Framemaker (Score:3, Insightful)
With properly defined templates prior to writing, it's a snap. Though you could spend a while making 'standardized templates'. I'm a professional tech writer and author many documents (think User's Guides, Service Guides etc..) for a large computer company. There's a dozen of us on the team and this makes it easy to bring a new techwriter up to speed.
The best part, what you see on the screen is exactly what gets printed out. Framemaker has it's place. For making a quick document not really, but for more "industrial efforts" it's definitely better than both word and open/star/neo office.
Framemaker is so EOL though... (Score:3, Interesting)
But Adobe as EOL (End Of Lifed) Framemaker. I don't know how much longer we'll be able to use it, and certainly I don't think we'll see a Universal version (unless there is one I was not aware of)? In any case, Adobe has made it pretty clear that's not where you should start looking for a document processor to take you into the future.
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I feel your pain. my sister is a tech writer and can't believe FrameMaker is EOL, I'm an artist and can't believe Freehand is dead. Adobe has a strange habit of killing prod
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Bandwidth abuse? (Score:4, Insightful)
I mean, out of 152MB for the PPC download, 20MB of that was source code that only.01% of the users will ever even glance at out of curiosity.
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Makes everyone GPL compliant & guarantees free (Score:3, Informative)
Disclaimer: I am a founder of the NeoOffice [neooffice.org] project.
The reason to include the source code is both moral and practical.
From a practical standpoint, it ensures that everyone providing NeoOffice needs to take no special action to comply with the GPL. According to our interpretation, anyone who provides a binary that is licensed under GPL is also obligated to provide the source code for that program. By placing the source code package within our disk images, anyone and everyone who provides the disk image
NeoOffice opens its web site on launch (Score:3, Informative)
I finally gave up on NeoOffice for a reason which sounds sort of trivial, but over time came to annoy me so much that I couldn't stand it any longer.
Whenever I launch NeoOffice, my web browser pops to the front and some stupid NeoOffice web page loads. I've never looked at the page; it may be something very important, but I find this sort of behaviour so annoying that I always close it as it's loading. A program should do what you tell it to. This stupid business with windows always opening and seizing focus as side-effects of other things is exactly why I hate the Windows interface, and I sure don't want it on my Mac.
I searched on the web and never found a way to disable this nuisance, so I gave up and switched to OpenOffice.org's version.
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NeoOffice rocks. (Score:3, Informative)
If you use it, please donate a couple of $10 bills to their efforts through PayPal on their web page. I've made several small donations to them over the past three years and I think it was money well spent.
Re:also of interest to mac users: (Score:5, Interesting)
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I've been an Apple guy my entire life, except for cutting my teenage teeth on Timex/Sinclair 1000 & 2068. My first Apple was an Apple IIGS, and after that PowerBook 520c, Blue & White PowerMac G3, and finally PowerMac G5 with dually 2.7 GHz PowerPC processors. OpenOffice 2.2.1, which requires X11, is my main office suite of choice after NeoOffice fell behind last year with releases. I like using OpenOffice, and it's nice to have a word processor that actually has the 'home' a
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