Random Tidbits
•••
I just finished
supporting one of our fourth grade teacher's
movie-making project with her class. The children
wrote, directed, and starred in their own production.
A good time was had by all – except for us adults who
had to piece everything together in the end!
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editing the film in
iMovie & iDVD
On a related note, I'm also trying to
finish up this year's fifth grade memories DVD. Even
though I'm ahead of schedule compared to previous
years, it still feels like this project will never be
done! Throw a talent show into the mix, and things
just get nutty!
•••
In totally unrelated news, I noticed that the most
recent version of NeoOffice displays the correct
"close" widget on unsaved documents! You might
remember that I noted this as a flaw in my overview
of NeoOffice earlier this year.
•••
Finally, this made me utter a hushed "woot!" of awe:
To paraphrase the cinematic trailer – it's about
time, indeed.
A Brief Look at NeoOffice 2.1
NeoOffice: Writer First Impressions • NeoOffice: Look + Feel • NeoOffice: Impress First Impressions
NeoOffice: The Rest of the Package • NeoOffice: Wish List • NeoOffice: Final Thoughts
Last week, NeoOffice recieved an incremental upgrade to version 2.1. Notable new features include support for Office 2007 OpenXML Word documents with support for Excel and PowerPoint OpenXML in a future release. Support for Excel VBA macros is reaffirmed – important because this will be the only tool on the Mac with this feature once MS Office 2004 is discontinued. The default icon set is now Akua, and version 2.1 gains more support for native Aqua widgets.
The first thing I noticed is that NeoOffice 2.1 launches in about one-quarter the time version 2.0 did on my MacBook Pro. Unfortunately, the application is still modular with no way to select which module opens upon launch. I'm poking through the application package to see if I can find an easy workaround for this. I'll make a new post if I can come up with a solution! OpenOffice for Windows is treated like a suite of applications, so this derivation should be able to emulate that feature.
As advertised, NeoOffice looks much more like a Mac OS X application upon launch, and the Akua toolbar icons look right at home.
The close widget still does not behave correctly when a document has unsaved changes, though, and dialog boxes as well as contextual menus still look like the are emulating aqua. They are close to being right, but the difference is noticeable. (This is true for drop-down menus and tabs too.)
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so close yet so far...
Word, PowerPoint, and Excel documents all seem to import just fine. The only problem I've had with opening Word documents is if the document uses non-standard bullets. With PowerPoint files, sometimes image formatting and transitions may be lost or altered. I haven't been able to test macro support as I have no documents requiring that feature. As far as Open XML Word documents go, I've downloaded three sample documents and none of them have opened correctly. However, like Excel macros, this may not be a feature I'll use often enough to miss.
Overall, this update does little to make NeoOffice 2.1 more compelling than version 2.0. It's still as reliable as it ever was, but it still feels slightly out-of-place on Mac OS X. That said, it does make for a compelling (free) alternative to MS Office 2004, and the performance gains alone should be enough to encourage existing users to upgrade. Especially if you are an Intel Mac user tired of Office's Rosetta-dependent performance lag, download NeoOffice, and give it a try. You might be pleasantly surprised.
Links 03/29/07
The San Francisco Chronicle has a decent overview of the events surrounding the abuse aimed at Kathy Sierra and the subsequent hiatus of Creating Passionate Users. Again, of all people, I have such a hard time believing she was made into a target.
Playlist: iTunes Completes Me
...and this wasn't a feature from day one because?
Scribd: They didn't study
Here is a small but amusing collection of "creative" answers from students who either became too frustrated with the material or just had no clue what they were doing.
Infinite Loop: Minireview: NeoOffice 2.1 for OS X
All in all, this is a highly-recommended download. But that doesn't mean there aren't any downsides. This Aqua version is a far cry from early X11 StarOffice ports that looked like they were running on Windows 98, prehistoric save dialogs and all. But if you're one to complain about UI consistency, you may be less than impressed by by the look and little things, such as the way the home and end keys on the keyboard behave like they do on a PC (or a Microsoft application). And NeoOffice's look is very much inspired by Microsoft Office.
Also, performance was sluggish on his PowerBook G4. On the other hand, it's pretty zippy on Intel Macs.
OpenOffice.org: Press Release – OpenOffice 2.2
This update patches some newly discovered vulnerabilities, improve on-screen text appearance, and has other small improvements.
Links 03/27/07
Suite flavors from $1599 to $2499. I only wish I could afford this stuff!
Newlaunches.com: Top 10 Apple products which flopped
My favorite on this list is Cyberdog. It's like Microsoft BOB for the internet. That's not a compliment, by the way.
via TUAW
Opposable Thumbs: Game Review: Burnout Dominator (PS2)
This is an odd beast: a Burnout game that focuses on long stretches of road, careful use of your boost, and a return to the fundamentals of racing. Is that a good thing? It really depends on your tastes, but in Dominator it seems like you're giving up much of what made the series great in order for Criterion to explore some of the classical elements of the series in the current market.
Myself, I initially liked Dominator. It's single player mode is pretty compelling, but multiplayer is a buzz-kill. Aftertouch slowdown and crashbreakers are disabled in multiplayer. Bleh.
FreeSMUG: NeoOffice 2.1 is available as a free download
This is based on the OpenOffice 2.1 code-base, and it features support for Office 2007 documents and Excel macros. I'll post impressions sometime next week, but I've already noticed one big improvement: It launches in about a quarter of the time as 2.0.3.
NeoOffice: Final Thoughts
Over the course of a few posts, I'm going to be looking at the text editor, NeoOffice Writer, and the presentation module, NeoOffice Impress, to see how they compare to Microsoft Word 2004 and Microsoft PowerPoint 2004 in daily use. These articles are not going to be deeply technical or philosophical. They are just going to reflect my thoughts and feelings as I take the software through some paces.
Current posts:
NeoOffice: Writer First Impressions • NeoOffice: Look + Feel • NeoOffice: Impress First Impressions
NeoOffice: The Rest of the Package • NeoOffice: Wish List • NeoOffice: Final Thoughts
As I wrap up these posts on NeoOffice, I can't help but be impressed by the software. Are there rough edges? Yes. Are there some usability issues that need to be resolved? Yes. However, the size and scope of this project is just impressive, especially when considering the small size of the development team and the fact that this is not commercial software – it is entirely free. Its very existence (as well as that of its parent project OpenOffice) sternly challenges the notion that we as consumers are obligated to continually pay for expensive productivity software.
Will NeoOffice supplant my normal workflow involving Keynote and Pages? Probably not. I like these two applications too much to give them up, and I will happily upgrade to the next versions of these applications whenever Apple rolls them out. On the other hand, can NeoOffice replace my Office installation? That is a more interesting question.
On my PowerMac G5, Microsoft Office outperforms NeoOffice at every turn. It's more reliable, and it is more stable. On the other hand, NeoOffice and MS Office are very comparable in terms of performance and stability on my new MacBook Pro. I still see some weird redraw issues in NeoOffice, but not near what was present on the G5. (By the way, these performance gains support my theory that the PPC version of NeoOffice is being throttled by the Java code.) The fact that I like the layout of NeoOffice's interface better than the mess of floating toolbars that is Microsoft Office 2004 is additionally helpful.
I think I'm going to try to supplant Word and PowerPoint with the NeoOffice equivalents for the next couple of months and see how things go. Those are my two most commonly used Microsoft applications, so this will grant me plenty of opportunities to grow even more familiar with NeoOffice and grow accustomed to its quirks. However, I will probably still upgrade to Office 2008 when it becomes available later this year, especially if I can still get it through the university.
As a couple of final notes, starting February 27, the NeoOffice team will begin seeding a new milestone of their product to members of their Early Access Program. One key feature of this release is support for OpenXML documents and VBA macro support. Also, the OpenOffice team is currently working on a Mac OS X native version of the original, and I'll be checking that out when it becomes available. Ideally, I think it would be great if the OpenOffice team and the NeoOffice team combined resources as opposed to creating competing free products.
By and large, I've really been getting into NeoOffice. As I learn more about coding, I will definitely look into contributing toward ways I hope the product can be improved. It amazes me that something like this can exist in an economy that has become so centered around commercial solutions and specific vendors, and I hope NeoOffice continues its development for many years to come.
NeoOffice: Wish List
Over the course of a few posts, I'm going to be looking at the text editor, NeoOffice Writer, and the presentation module, NeoOffice Impress, to see how they compare to Microsoft Word 2004 and Microsoft PowerPoint 2004 in daily use. These articles are not going to be deeply technical or philosophical. They are just going to reflect my thoughts and feelings as I take the software through some paces.
Current posts:
NeoOffice: Writer First Impressions • NeoOffice: Look + Feel • NeoOffice: Impress First Impressions
NeoOffice: The Rest of the Package • NeoOffice: Wish List • NeoOffice: Final Thoughts
So far, my experience with NeoOffice has been a positive one, but I can't help but feel this application seems out of place in Mac OS X. Here are some points I've accumulated. Please note that some would be far easier to implement than others. In an ideal world, any of these could be achievable, but I understand that the NeoOffice team is very small, so few or none of these wishes may make future versions.
Native Interface Components
NeoOffice seems to rely on Java's cross-platform interface elements to fit into Mac OS X. As noted in the post about look-and-feel, this works – but only to a point. Some interface elements, like the close button, don't behave as they should, and many Aqua-fied Java elements just look awkward. Moving forward, it would be nice if NeoOffice began to slowly adopt an entirely Aqua native interface that fully blended into the Mac OS X environment. Right now, the interface still feels foreign despite its shiny exterior.iLife Media Browser
This one may be harder to implement since I don't think Apple has a public API for interfacing with the iApps. Still, some programs like RapidWeaver and Swift Publisher have pulled it off. There is even a shareware application called Media Browser that gives users a universal iLife media browser. This would hopefully be a part of making NeoOffice play nicer with iPhoto and iTunes media.Drag & Drop Improvements
I noticed many times that I tried to just drop an image into a NeoOffice document window directly from the Finder or iPhoto, the image did not appear. I had to go through the "Insert > Image > From File..." method. If you are like me and keep all images in iPhoto, this is not a fun solution at all. Hopefully, future versions will offer better drag-and-drop support.
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Drag & Drop or a media browser (like the one shown here from RapidWeaver) are both more efficient than browsing for an iPhoto image.
Modular or Not Modular
This last one is pretty big in terms of what philosophy NeoOffice is following. Right now, NeoOffice is a modular application. This means you open one application to access all of its components. This is in contrast to Microsoft Office or Apple iWork, for example, which are application suites. The programs work together, but you open the application unique to the kind of document you wish to create (presentation, spreadsheet, text document, etc.). The problem I run into with NeoOffice's modular state is that I must open a Writer document first, regardless of what I wish to create. Then I can choose a different document type from the application menu or the Dock menu.
It would be nice if, when NeoOffice is launched, a project selector of some kind would appear. I'm partial to the one that appeared when launching Appleworks 6 that gave you access to each module, your recent documents, and some templates and assistants (think wizards) by way of a series of tabs. It was clan, uncluttered, and it got the job done. If NeoOffice wants to remain modular, it really should adopt a project launcher like this. Otherwise, each module should be a separate application, making NeoOffice into an application suite instead.
AppleWorks Starting Points. Image from Wikipedia.
Conclusion
There are other things I would like to see – soft shadows, better translucency effects, better scroll-wheel support in drop-down lists (like the font menu) – but these are really some of the bigger elements that would make NeoOffice an even better experience for end users such as myself. None of these are really deal-breaker quality exclusions, but including features like these would help NeoOffice blend in even better with Mac OS X and other applications.NeoOffice: The Rest of the Package
Over the course of a few posts, I'm going to be looking at the text editor, NeoOffice Writer, and the presentation module, NeoOffice Impress, to see how they compare to Microsoft Word 2004 and Microsoft PowerPoint 2004 in daily use. These articles are not going to be deeply technical or philosophical. They are just going to reflect my thoughts and feelings as I take the software through some paces.
Current posts:
NeoOffice: Writer First Impressions • NeoOffice: Look + Feel • NeoOffice: Impress First Impressions
NeoOffice: The Rest of the Package • NeoOffice: Wish List • NeoOffice: Final Thoughts
In addition to Writer and Impress, NeoOffice includes modules called Calc, Draw, Math, and Base.Each of these has unique functions and adds value to the overall NeoOffice package. I am not a heavy user of these features, so I am not ready to speak to the quality of these products. This post will just let you see what they look like and what functionality they provide.
NeoOffice Calc
This is a very important component for MS Office compatibility – the spreadsheet application. Excel is used and misused in many work environments for a variety of tasks. Calc is the only Excel alternative on the Mac platform that can run macros in the spreadsheets, and when Office 2008 ships for the Macintosh, NeoOffice Calc will be the only solution for macro-embedded Excel files as the next Mac version of Office is dropping macro support. This fact alone should make Calc alluring for Macintosh business users.
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Excel & Calc side-by-side
I simply imported an Excel spreadsheet I use a lot at school to see how it works in Calc, and I'm happy to say that everything seems intact. As you can see, some of the formatting in the top cells disappeared, but that is hardly mission critical. The little I know about Excel works as expected in Calc, and I have to say that the NeoOffice alternative is much less cluttered. (As an aside, MS Office 2008 for Mac is finally ditching those annoying floating toolbars.)
Math & Base
I really can't say much about either of these as I have no experience with math and database programs. However, it is important to note that these programs fill voids in the world of Macintosh productivity suites. No Macintosh office suite ships with a database solution – not even the most expensive version of MS Office. I suppose you could count AppleWorks, but Apple doesn't really support that suite anymore as iWork is slowly assuming its place in Apple's software matrix.Math seems to be a very straightforward equation editor, and I had little trouble figuring the application out. Base has a much steeper learning curve, but it looks similar to the limited exposure I've had to Access. Database users should be comfortable here, and the program is fairly flexible, supporting Access, MySQL, and other popular database formats.
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Math and Base in action
Draw
Many Mac users remember the drawing module that was a part of AppleWorks. Unfortunately, while Pages and Keynote have some nice drawing tools, there has not been a simple drawing application included with Macs for quite a while. While Draw was fun to use, like MS Paint on Windows, I really couldn't see myself ever using this module (although it is much more flexible than Paint).
Conclusion
NeoOffice is a very complete package. Basically every element you would expect to find in a business-class productivity suite is here, and the entire package is free. While I have some reservations about the current version of NeoOffice, the value of the suite is undeniable. There is a ton of functionality packaged here, more than is available with any single commercial Macintosh productivity package. That fact alone makes it worth downloading and trying out.Stay tuned. For my next NeoOffice-themed post, I'll be delving into a small wish-list for the application.
NeoOffice: Impress First Impressions
Over the course of a few posts, I'm going to be looking at the text editor, NeoOffice Writer, and the presentation module, NeoOffice Impress, to see how they compare to Microsoft Word 2004 and Microsoft PowerPoint 2004 in daily use. These articles are not going to be deeply technical or philosophical. They are just going to reflect my thoughts and feelings as I take the software through some paces.
Current posts:
NeoOffice: Writer First Impressions • NeoOffice: Look + Feel • NeoOffice: Impress First Impressions
NeoOffice: The Rest of the Package • NeoOffice: Wish List • NeoOffice: Final Thoughts
I'm going to get something out of the way right now. Subjectively, I like NeoOffie Impress better than MS PowerPoint 2004. I'm going to be critical of a few points in this post, so I just wanted to get that out of the way first. Having said that, let's move on...
Upon opening a new Impress document, I had to sigh when I saw another wizard greeting me. Fortunately, you can jump out of the Wizard by clicking "Create," and it's possible to disable this Wizard altogether in the preferences.
It looks like my work computer!
Impress has an
interesting tabbed interface atop the main document
window, and these tabs cycle between different views
for your presentation. The choices are Normal,
Outline, Notes, Handout, and Slide Sorter. Of these,
I thought Notes was particularly useful because this
feature could be used to create annotated slide
handouts like the one's I discussed in this
post.
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The Normal and Notes
views
Slide Sorter view
The interface for NeoOffice impress is at once more
inviting and more prohibitive than MS PowerPoint.
It's more inviting in that the interface is much less
cluttered than PowerPoint's. One of the more
interesting ways in which this is accomplished is
through toolbars that appear and disappear as they
are needed. For example, if I select some text, the
picture formatting toolbar is replaced by the text
formatting one. Also the use of thumbnail slide's in
the navigator is far superior to PowerPoint's habit
of only showing the slide's text. (I know this
problem is unique to the Mac version of PowerPoint.)
Unfortunately, the interface is more prohibitive in
that many features are buried in subcommands and
dialog boxes. Doing something so simple as changing
the background color of the slide requires jumping
through a few hoops, but I felt like this dialog box
served to illustrate this issue best:
Yup, that's a dialog box for cropping an image. This
is what you get when selecting the crop tool from the
toolbar. In every other app I know, cropping (or
masking) is done directly in the document window and
applied to the image live. By contrast, in NeoOffice
Impress, you have to manually choose the dimensions
of the image. This can be much more accurate, but it
is less intuitive to the average user. Fortunately,
that thumbnail image previews your changes before you
apply them.
My other main criticism of Impress centers around
performance. It's bad. It makes my G5 feel like a G3
trying to run Unreal Tournament 2004. It is that
painful at times. Dragging objects around slides
always left visible screen artifacts on my machine,
and I was finding myself continually minimizing and
restoring the document window to minimize the clutter
created by these artifacts.
Unfortunately, bringing the document window out of
the dock carried its own hazards. Sometimes, it would
take Impress a few minutes to redraw on the screen,
and the whole application locked up once in the
process of redraw.
I had to eventually
Force Quit the app to escape from this.
Again, my experience tells me that the Java code in
NeoOffice is the culprit here. I don't care what the
theory says, in practice complex Java code runs
poorly on PPC processors. If I'm correct, these
performance issues practically disappear once I get a
chance to test this software on an Intel-based
Macintosh.
Other small quirks persist. For example, drag-and
drop support for images is inconsistent at best,
making the use of iPhoto images tricky (though I
found copy-and-paste to be a good workaround for
this). Copying and pasting elements from one slide to
another does not always work, and customizing
toolbars proved to be a futile task. It was easy
enough to go through the customization process. The
problem is that Impress would revert to the defult
toolbars every few minutes.
After these criticisms, it may be hard to believe my
first pragraph – that I like Impress better than
PowerPoint – but it is true. At this point, Impress
canot supplant PowerPoint when I need to create more
PC-friendly presentations due mainly to performance
issues. However, Impress just feels more thought out
than PowerPoint does, and that is a great testament
to the power of Open Source. One example of that
really connected with me was in adding text to a
formatted object or image. In PowerPoint, you have to
either select the object and choose "Insert Text..."
from a contextual menu, or you just create a separate
text box and place it atop the image. In Impress (as
in Keynote), all you have to do is double-click the
object – it doesn't matter if it's a drawn shape or a
photograph.
NeoOffice Impress shows great petential, but it is
hampered more severely than Writer in terms of bugs
and performance. If Impress were more responsive and
more predictable in its image-handling, then it would
easily supplant PowerPoint. As it is, NeoOffice
Impress is an application I really like but can't see
myself using on a daily basis.
NeoOffice: Look + Feel
Over the course of a few posts, I'm going to be looking at the text editor, NeoOffice Writer, and the presentation module, NeoOffice Impress, to see how they compare to Microsoft Word 2004 and Microsoft PowerPoint 2004 in daily use. These articles are not going to be deeply technical or philosophical. They are just going to reflect my thoughts and feelings as I take the software through some paces.
Current posts:
NeoOffice: Writer First Impressions • NeoOffice: Look + Feel • NeoOffice: Impress First Impressions
NeoOffice: The Rest of the Package • NeoOffice: Wish List • NeoOffice: Final Thoughts
The look-and-feel of applications is pretty important to the Mac experience. Well designed Macintosh applications have a polish to the user interface that is seldom present on other platforms. Therefore, if NeoOffice is going to gain a healthy following among the Mac-faithful, it is important that it have the Macintosh feel correct. This aspect may be somewhat abstract and trivial to alpha-geeks and power users, but the user experience cannot be ignored when developing an application for the Mac.
Saying this, how does NeoOffice do? Put simply, I've seen better, and I've seen worse – much worse.
Upon launch, I found the toolbars to be immediately distracting. The icons in them were spartan at best, and it really looked like a stereotypical open source project. Toolbars are nearly indispensable in office appications, so this was a difficult flaw to overlook.
The default toolbar appearance in NeoOffice Writer
Fortunately, it didn't take me long
to figure out that you could change the toolbar's
appearance within the preferences. Also a program
called Iconic allowed me to install additional
sets. Here are some variations for the toolbar:
The Industrial
style
The Crystal
style
The Akua
style
The default
style would be at home on Windows 95. Industrial
looks very GNOME to me while Crystal makes me
think of Windows XP. I bet you can guess which of
these icon sets I'm using right now in NeoOffice.
(Hint: It's phonetically identical to "aqua.")
Fortunately, some small changes in the preferences
can really lead to a more pleasant visual
experience with NeoOffice.
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Before &
After!
Unfortunately, even after some
tweaking, a few elements still seem very
out-of-place. Many small widgets in the interface
lack the Aqua look-and-feel emulated by the rest of
the program. Some text looks incorrectly placed in
tabs, and the floating toolbars are boxy and
Windows-esque (with the window controls on the wrong
side of the toolbar).
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Another Aqua discrepancy I noticed was in the window
controls of the main application. In most OS X
applications, if you have unsaved changes in the
documents, the red "close window" control has a
dimple in it. Otherwise it is smooth as the other
buttons. In NeoOffice, the red "close" button is
smooth whether your document has unsaved changes or
not.
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Pages shows the document
has unsaved changes. NeoOffice does not.
Despite
these shortcomings, NeoOffice does integrate well
with Mac OS X in some key areas, including the print,
save, and open dialog boxes/sheets. The application
uses the standard controls for printing and saving
that you would find in any native OS X application.
This is a nice touch of familiarity in the
application, and it keeps the user experience in
these areas consistent with what you would expect for
a Mac application.
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Here are some
native dialogs in NeoOffice.
Overall, NeoOffice
succeeds in almost feeling like a native Mac
application, and, when compared to the X11 version of
OpenOffice, that is a pretty impressive
accomplishment. Some minor issues hold the product
back from really creating an immersive Macintosh
experience, but it is important to remember that this
product is a work in progress. It is only
consistently developed by three guys who are (for all
intents and purposes) unfunded. NeoOffice 2 is the
product of hard work and dedication. Yes, the
interface has some inconsistencies and could use
improvement, but it is a solid starting point.
In their wiki, the NeoOffice team states (regarding the use of
Java): "If it looks like a duck, walks like a
duck, and quacks like a duck, then to the end user
it's a duck, and end users have made it pretty
clear they want a duck; whether the duck drinks
hot chocolate or coffee is irrelevant." Right now,
I can tell that the duck is drinking coffee even
without diving into the documentation. However, at
this rate, it won't be long until NeoOffice can
seamlessly blend in with my other Macintosh
applications.
NeoOffice: Writer First Impressions
Over the course of a few posts, I'm going to be looking at the text editor, NeoOffice Writer, and the presentation module, NeoOffice Impress, to see how they compare to Microsoft Word 2004 and Microsoft PowerPoint 2004 in daily use. These articles are not going to be deeply technical or philosophical. They are just going to reflect my thoughts and feelings as I take the software through some paces.
Current posts:
NeoOffice: Writer First Impressions • NeoOffice: Look + Feel • NeoOffice: Impress First Impressions
NeoOffice: The Rest of the Package • NeoOffice: Wish List • NeoOffice: Final Thoughts
Upon launching NeoOffice, I was immediately greeted by a setup “wizard,” which immediately set within me a sense of foreboding. “Wizard” is not a very Mac-like term, but I went through the process, which, in and of itself was fairly painless. The only real nit to pick is that registering the product took me to a sign-in page for existing NeoOffice users – not a page to create a new account.
That aside, NeoOffice Writer looks a lot like MS Word for Windows. This is by no means a slight. It just means that Office users will feel right at home in the interface. On the other hand, it does look alien on the Mac desktop as even the Mac version of Word looks very different from its Windows counterpart.
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NeoOffice Writer on the left; Word on the right.
In terms of functionality, Writer has pretty much everything users have come to expect in a word processor. The only notable absence has been a built-in Grammar Check. On the other hand, NeoOffice seems to have some drawing tools, like curve, circle segment, and pie that are not present in Word. Also, NeoOffice has a built-in bibliography database available in the Tools menu. Unfortunately, I can't get it to format a bibliography automatically the way EndNote will in Word. Another good bit of news is that NeoOffice has extensive macro support – a feature that is scheduled to be eliminated from the next Mac version of Office.
Writer open with the database browser and macro dialog box.
As far as other features, Spell
Check seems on par with Word, and you can right-click
on a marked word for spelling suggestions – just like
in the Microsoft alternative. In fact, you can do an
awful lot with text formatting by right-clicking on
it, something I think MS Word is definitely trailing
the OpenOffice team on.
You can export a document as a PDF directly from the
app, a task which is roundabout in Office 2004 for
the Mac and nonexistent in Office 2003 for Windows.
Included templates and clip art is minimal,
but templates found here
and
clip art here work fine with the NeoOffice
applications. Since I seldom use templates or clip
art, this doesn't really bother me.
I opened a few MS Word documents with NeoOffice with
varying results. Basic documents opened without a
hitch. Many that contained drawings or shapes also
opened fine, but the shapes would occasionally be in
the wrong place. Some opened and could be edited
while others opened as "read-only" and I had to "Save
As..." to edit. Bullets points were consistently lost
in the transition, but, surprisingly, most clip art
and images survived the transition. Overall, the
application's compatibility with Word documents is
pretty good.
On the downsides, the look-and-feel (which I'll talk
about more in another post) doesn't quite fit in with
Mac OS X despite efforts to aquify the application,
and performance is sluggish on my G5 PowerMac. This
is especially true in redrawing elements like
toolbars. On my PowerBook G3, the performance is
downright dismal. I suspect the combination of
PowerPC and Java elements is the culprit. On the
other hand, there is an Intel build available, and
I'll be interested in trying that out whenever I get
around to updating my hardware.
Just waiting for
the rest to show up...
In conclusion, I can see where NeoOffice could
supplant MS Office for the budget-conscious. While it
has some issues, it is very capable on its own and in
working with Microsoft-compatible formats. Stay tuned
for some more posts like these in the near future
regarding NeoOffice!