Related link: http://www.planamesa.com/neojava/en/download.php
Everyone has certain apps that they diligently cover, and one of mine is NeoOffice. Since writing an overview of NeoOffice and announcing the release of NeoOffice 1.2 Alpha last month, I’m posting again to make sure you’re keeping up with the latest. If you haven’t noticed, this project continues to make solid improvements — a very good sign indeed. I don’t think we have to worry about this one dying anytime soon. (OSS does tend to do that from time to time.)
It’s an easy (but rather large) download with plenty of bug fixes since the alpha release, so go get it. If you have a slow connection, just set it up to download while you get some ZZZ and you’ll have something to look forward to in the morning.
I know from previous discussions that NeoOffice is a hard sell for some of you, but if you don’t have anything new to say, I’d still like to ask you to do something: point out one thing you love and one thing you hate about it. If everyone takes a moment to respond, it’ll be interesting to see what the cumulative stats end up being — and it will be good feedback for Patrick, it’s lead developer.
And BTW, did anyone else notice that the they dropped the trailing “/J” as of the 1.2 alpha release? No need to make that distinction anymore, I suppose.
As always, I love to hear about your thoughts on office productivity tools, so feel free to chime in with what you use to get your work done.
Okay
+ Getting closer to being a "true Mac app"
- Performance is still pretty bad
NeoOffice
+Does everything i want in an office programe
-Loads to slow
Pros and Cons
+ Great set of tools
- Menus and app in general is often unresponsive
Sometimes I'll notice a significant lag between when I select a drop-down menu and when that menu actually displays.
Very slow
I'm running NeoOffice in a mac mini. Great product with all the functionality I could ever want, but very slow. Even scrolling through small documents can be slow. I hope v1.2 picks up some speed.
NeoOffice
- based on OpenOffice, which is Microsoftian in its complexity
+ very robust for a beta, not lost data yet
NeoOffice pro/con
= OpenOffice is a necessary evil: bloated and ugly but useful
+ Better MacOS integration than the X11 port
- Slow slow slow. (TiBook @ 1GHz + 1GB RAM)
Good Spreadsheet
I use NeoOffice solely for the spreadsheet and I'm very glad it exists. I just haven't found another option besides Excel. And I don't want to buy Office just for Excel and Excel alone is almost as much as Office. I really only use a few spreadsheets, so Excel just isn't worth the investment for me.
Pro: Full featured spreadsheet that I don't have to worry about being locked into a single vendor's file format.
Con: It really could be faster; especially on startup.
Bonus Pro: It really instills confidence with me the way that NeoOffice is constantly updated. Patrick, Ed & the crew really do a great job of improving the application and keeping it up to date with the OpenOffice.org releases.
Pros and Cons
Overall I love NeoOffice. For me it just works and I don't have to fight with X Windows. It does everything I need it to.
Pro: I've yet to run across a Word document that I wasn't able to open with it (including some that Word wouldn't open).
Cons:I haven't found a way to type a tab inside a table in Writer. You apparently can't have a chart take up an entire sheet in Calc.