NeoOffice 2.2.1 Available For Mac

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."

Re:too little, too late?

[c_forq]

While I like iWork (especially Numbers) as a word processor I find it lacking. For layout it is easily the best program I have ever used, but for writing a research paper I would rather use Microsoft Word. Last time I did a research paper on Open Office it severely screwed up my footnotes (which on a 50 page document with 1-6 footnotes per page is kind of a big deal). Unfortunately Microsoft Office 2004 seems slow on my MacBook (I'm told this is due to it being a non-universal application and running through Rosetta) so I am still looking forward for Microsoft Office 2008. I still have high hopes for iWork to continue to progress, Apple seems to be very good at looking at what people are doing and want to do with programs, and have seemed to always put effort into serving students in higher education.

Re:too little, too late?

[Bluesman]

Use LaTeX for research papers. Thank me later.

Re:too little, too late?

[Just Some Guy]

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?

Re:too little, too late?

[Just Some Guy]

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.

Framemaker

[HockeyPuck]

For single author, single file documents, MSWord, Openoffice work fine, but when your working on books, larger documents that are comprised of "1 file per chapter" and require easy to use templates (MSWord creates new font templates automatically) so multiple authors can work on the document at the same time. I prefer to use Adobe Framemaker (unix/mac version available as well).

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.

Bandwidth abuse?

[NMerriam]

I appreciate the religious purity of putting both the binaries and source code in every download package, but wouldn't it be a bit kinder to the internet in general, the mirrors in particular, and all the users on non-infinite-speed connections, to allow you to download ONLY the binaries?

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.

Re:too little, too late?

[LKM]

I don't think Apple wants to compete with the whole of Office. They want to compete for the people who use Office, but don't really need it and would be happier with a simpler, more graphics-oriented solution.