[kingjules]

Hello,

A friend of mine just talked to me about the office application Open Office . I know, it's something that exists for a while now.
my question is, is it available for OS X and is it a reliable set of application?

I am on a cruisade against microsoft so i am trying to get rid of every MS apps on my mac.

thanks for your help
Jules

[533]

I'm occasionally using NeoOffice (OpenOffice port to MacOS X) to open Starwriter or OpenOffice files. Seems to work great and you don't need X11 to run it. I only use the word processing part, can't tell you anything about the other modules.

http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/22021

[JKT]

Trinity - the home site for the NeoOffice project (which aims to generate a fully Mac OS X native version of OOo). Various links there to the different sites relevant to OOo on the Mac.

OpenOffice.org - the porting page at OO.o for the Mac.

NeoWiki - the NeoOffice wiki which has a history of the project, tips and hints etc.

NeoOfficeJ is definitely the easiest way to use OOo on Mac OS X.

[kingjules]

thanks for your replies. but i am a bit confused.
what is the difference between OpenOffice and NeoOffice?
Which was is the best? are there separate programs?

Jules

[JKT]

Currently, the official OOo distribution only runs within the X11 environment and is, therefore, not a native Mac OS X application. NeoOfficeJ is a version of OOo that runs natively in Mac OS X - it is based upon OOo 1.1.4 and uses Java to allow it to run on OS X (see the NeoWiki I linked to for a fuller description). However, due to licensing issues (it is released under GPL rather than SISSL) it can't be considered an official version of OOo.

You can actually download both versions and run them together without any conflicts to see which better suits your needs. Personally, I would stick to NOJ as it has a number of benefits over OOo in X11 (such as using the OS X fonts, printing mechanism, keyboard shortcuts, etc). The main disadvantage of NeoOfficeJ is that is actually dependant on the X11 version for its codebase. The reason that this is a disadvantage is that OOo is approaching the release of version 2.0 of the app and this will appear as an X11 version for the Mac first. It will take some time for NOJ to be updated to the OOo 2.0 code.

[kingjules]

Hello,

thanks for your replies. I understand now the differences between OpenOffice and NeoOffice. And i think i will go for the NeoOffice version, even if it's a bit behind vs the OO version. I will help the mac community doing so.

thanks again, will update on how it works

Jules

[JKT]

Actually, NOJ is currently ahead of the stable OOo for X11 version (which is v1.1.2) as it is based on OOo 1.1.4, but with OOo 2.0 not far off reaching final status NOJ will fall behind again for a while.

[kingjules]

JKT, thanks for your help.
just downloaded the program and it's working fine so far. i have a file to build on excel and for this one, i will use NOJ.
it looks very windows-ish (the bar on the side, the tool bar, the window for opening).
but it's good

thanks all
jules

[JKT]

Originally Posted by kingjules

JKT, thanks for your help.
just downloaded the program and it's working fine so far. i have a file to build on excel and for this one, i will use NOJ.
it looks very windows-ish (the bar on the side, the tool bar, the window for opening).
but it's good

thanks all
jules

Unfortunately, the Mac simply isn't a tier 1 platform for OpenOffice.org - the result is that the app is designed primarily for Solaris, Windows and Linux. The consequence is that the UI is not designed with the Mac in mind. It's the aim of the NeoOffice project to make it a more Mac-like app and, believe me, they have made a huge amount of progress in that respect, especially as there have been only 1 or 2 people involved in the actual programming for the large majority of the time (it is now 3 people, but the third only joined recently and they are going to have to stop again in month or so time).

Do you have Office/Excel - it would be wise to check that your progress in NeoOfficeJ is compatible with Excel if you need to. While the compatibility is good it isn't 100%. One major limitation I have found is that MS Excel 2004 can't cope with more than 255 data points in a bar chart, which is particularly crap, whereas NOJ can, and if you are going to use a vast amount of data, OOo and therefore NOJ have a 32 000 or so limit on the number of rows you can have in your sheet whereas Excel's is roughly double that.

[kingjules]

thanks JKT for all this info.
i have read a bit and it's truly amazing that these guys have been doing all thsi work. and for that i will try my best to use it as much as i can. doing so, hopefully, will make them see that there are some users that appreciate the work they are doing.
even if i don't want to, i have MS XLS 2004 and i will keep checking the compatibility, even with the windows based computer i have for work.

thanks again for all these tips

Jules

[JKT]

Well, its good to hear that you like it - a lot of hard work has gone into it and the folks involved in the Mac OpenOffice.org and NeoOffice/J projects are some of the unsung heros of the Mac OS X world IMNSHO. If you have any user issues, be sure to ask at the trinity.neooffice.org forums where there are people who can try to help out, and if you come across any bugs, please post them at the Neo Bugzilla (link can be found at Trinity)... also, if you feel like making a donation (financial or user support wise) to help keep the project going, Patrick and Ed appreciate them all, no matter how large or small

A bit more news - at the moment, beta testing is occurring for a new update which sees a switch from Java 1.3.x to Java 1.4.2 as the basis for the NeoOffice/J specific code (it's a fairly major upgrade to the nuts and bolts to ensure NeoOffice/J can run on the MacIntel hardware when it comes out, so isn't yet recommended as an install for normal usage and won't be until more of the bugs have been ironed out).* The switch from 1.3.x to 1.4.2 will (hopefully) also improve the performance of NeoOffice/J a bit as it removes the need for some screen drawing hacks that Patrick had to make to overcome some serious bugs in Apple's Java 1.3.x implementation (these impacted on the performance by quite a bit and are one of the reasons why e.g. contextual menu display isn't very quick in the current version of NeoOffice/J).

* However, be sure to install any patches that are officially recommended as these will contain the latest bug fixes and optimisations and any fixes that were in prior patches too. If you haven't already, sign up for notification of new patches. The last stable patch was patch-0 which fixed a minor bug in the release version of 1.1 - to make the NeoOffice/J>Preferences menu item work.

[outsourced]

I switched from OpenOffice to NeoOffice a while ago. However, it isn't fully compatible with Word.

I've lost count of the number of times I have had to reformat/fix documents because of font translation and border issues. But, NeoOffice does handle these better then OO.

Just the other day, I tried opening one of the "problem" documents with AbiWord. Like magic, the Word doc was translated much better than NeoOffice. At least the bullets were translated into...bullets instead of square boxes. And, the double border came through.

Biggest problem: The first page header is on the 2nd page; the 2nd page header is on the 1st page.

So...no matter how much I despise MS, I'll continue to use Word on VPC. It's just not worth spending extra time fixing documents.

[kingjules]

i understand your point, and for sure it will be hard to have a version of NO fully compatible with MS. I am not a big Word user, so hopefully i will not have to reformat every document i do. I am more an Excel fan. I am trying to do something with it at the moment, and as you said, i will check the compatibility with Mac Office and even the Windowas office.
now as i say before, using NOJ will make one more user in the list and thus make the 2 guys who are working on it know that more people use it.
we need an alternative to MS!!