You’ve probably heard of OpenOffice, the open source rival to Microsoft Office for the Mac and iWork. I love Microsoft Office on the Mac and iWork, but the price is more than I’m willing to spend.
Note: iWork isn’t too expensive, but still more than most are willing to pay for the features offered.
OpenOffice is great, but it lacks the beautiful OS X interface we’re all accustomed to. It runs on X11 which works, but quite frankly is ugly.
Meet NeoOffice, the Mac port of OpenOffice. NeoOffice is to OpenOffice as Adium is to Pidgin.
While NeoOffice doesn’t match OS X perfectly, it does run the Aqua interface which looks much better than X11. NeoOffice runs off Java, so it isn’t a speed demon, but it gets the job done and looks good while doing it.
This is the UI of OpenOffice:
NeoOffice implements all the different applications bundled in OpenOffice, including Presentation, Spreadsheet, Drawing and more.
While NeoOffice doesn’t handle all of the advanced features included in Microsoft Office 2008 for the Mac, it handles the large majority–which is good enough for most users.
While most of the NeoOffice changes from OpenOffice are cosmetic, there are some Mac-specific features detailed in the NeoOffice Wiki:
NeoOffice is a great solution for anyone looking for a free Office suite for the Mac.
The latest release, NeoOffice 2.2.3 is a whopping 148MB, so give your self some time to download.
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Travis Jeffery