NeoOffice 2.2.2 is a sharp office productivity suite similar to Microsoft Office for the Mac, and has many features which surpass it. Unlike MS Office, however, NeoOffice is open source and therefore free. Like Office, it includes a word processor called NeoOffice Writer, Calc, a spreadsheet builder, a polished presentation program, Impress, and a database program called Base. MS Office for Mac will set you back $399. And while NeoOffice is free, you will do much for your karma by giving a donation to the open source developers who created it all in the name of providing us superior alternatives to proprietary software.
NeoOffice offers support for Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and Excel 97-2007 formats. When creating files, Neo saves to the default OpenOffice.org format, unless you specify other formats such as .doc, .xls, .ppt, etc. If you have WordPerfect documents, you can import those, as well as Microsoft Works docs into NeoOffice.
NeoOffice runs on Mac machines without the need for installing X11, resulting in a more Mac like experience, including native pull-down menus and access to OS X’s installed fonts and printers. NeoOffice nicely integrates with Mail, and Finder and document contents are searchable by Spotlight. It uses the native Mac OS X Spellchecker and address book, includes native copy and paste support, as well as drag and drop support.
Writer
This program is so feature rich you probably wouldn’t use all the components offered, but you can have at it if you’re so inclined. You can incorporate database functions within your document, add drawings, call out buttons, insert graphics from files, add tables and highlight text. You can also insert video and sound from other files.
For the rest of us, there’s the ability to save in all various Word formats, including Word 2007, html, rtf and txt, as well as various others. We like how NeoOffice is so tightly integrated. You can create a new spreadsheet, presentation, document, drawing or database without having to launch the applications individually. There’s a handy button which with one click exports your document directly as a pdf.
NeoOffice has a nice user interface, which isn’t as slick as what Mac users have come to expect, but you can’t exactly argue with the price. And, there are some tweaks you can do to customize the view to your taste, which you can access under NeoOffice, Preferences, and then view. You can choose from several to suit your needs.
Included is a navigation function which helps you quickly access parts of your document. For instance, you can click on the Navigator and then click on the hyperlink icon which will then list all the hyperlinks within your document, providing you with point and click ease. The Navigator may be used in all the programs of NeoOffice, not just Writer.
If you’re not into creating everything from scratch, a wizard feature can help you create letters, faxes, agendas, presentations, and web pages. And there’s a styles and formatting menu to help you format your document to your taste.
We opened a 97 Word formatted document in NeoOffice and there were some formatting issues with the bullet points and spacing. The bullets were fixed with a click using Writer’s bullet and numbering pull down menu, and the spacing was fixed manually.
Writer was tested on a Macbook, 2GHz, Intel Core 2 Duo with 1GB SDRAM. The program was fast and responded quickly.
Calc
The spreadsheet program seems to have all the functionality of Excel, however, we did not test out all the functions within Calc. The interface was intuitive and we liked the fact that if we did have need of function capabilities, Calc has a wizard that will walk you through inserting them.
We opened a 2003 Excel spreadsheet in Calc and had no formatting problems whatsoever. If you are a heavy user of macros, NeoOffice supports Excel macros in Office 2007.
Impress
NeoOffice’s presentation program, Impress, has everything you would expect to find with nice slide layouts, and easy to access menus. Features include inserting sounds, movie clips, graphs, drawings. and spreadsheets. You can also create your own custom animations. The transitions are exhaustive. Impress can export presentations to Adobe Flash (SWF) files allowing them to be played on any computer with the Flash player installed.
Unfortunately, Impress comes with a handful of templates, so if you’re used to picking and choosing from numerous slide templates you might be disappointed. But, then $400 is an awful lot of money to pay for preloaded templates, the majority of which are um, not exactly inspired design.
There is a way to convert the plethora of ready made Microsoft Office templates to OpenOffice.org format which Solveig Haugland nicely walks you through in her in her blog tutorial on this subject.
Base and Draw
Base is NeoOffice’s database program. It offers access to file databases and spreadsheets and includes support for MySQL, Oracle and JDBC/ODBC.
Draw is a nice vector graphics component with similar features as Microsoft’s Publisher and is suitable for the average user. If you’re a professional artist, you’ll definitely want to stay with Gimp or Adobe.
Conclusion
NeoOffice is a great office productivity suite that offers more features than the average user would require. That it is compatible with so many file formats, is open source, has features which surpass many leading commercial applications, and is completely free, makes this an application you won’t want to pass up.
Minimum Machine Requirements for NeoOffice 2.2.2
To install and run NeoOffice, you must have the following:
- Mac OS X 10.3 or higher
- 512 MB of memory
- 400 MB of free disk space
Posted by FA Editors at 10:37 PM PST
