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scattered · Nov 23, 2007, 09:35 AM

I've been using NeoOffice for a few years now, and generally like it, although sometimes it becomes unbearably slow. But I've been offered a free license to Microsoft Office 2004 (with an upgrade to 2008 paid for as well; my dad is purchasing it for the family) and I'm considering switching. Are there any issues running Office on a MacBook with 1GB RAM? I do a lot of presentations, so a major selling point for me would be if PowerPoint runs particularly better than NeoOffice's presentation app.

Cold Warrior · Nov 23, 2007, 11:40 AM

PowerPoint 08 runs particularly well for a beta.

You should consider upgrading to 2GB RAM, if you find yourself with several applications open and in use simultaneously.

hempcamp · Nov 23, 2007, 06:56 PM

Go for it! It's a great deal today only -- you can get Office 2004 Student/Teacher for $30 after rebate and then a free upgrade to the special Media version of Office 2008 (when it comes out, $7 for shipping).

IMO, Office is the only professional word processing option on the Mac (or anywhere else for that matter). NeoOffice and Pages and AbiWord and Nisus all have their peculiarities when opening "real" Office files or saving files for someone to use in another environment. I hate Windows and pretty much everything else about Microsoft, but I do love their Mac Business Unit products!

I've been using Office v.X since it came out nearly 7 years ago! Only reasons I'm finally upgrading is 1) today's great deal probably won't come around again, and 2) will be nice to have a Universal app instead of using v.X on rosetta.

--Chris

PS - I do prefer Keynote to Powerpoint, and I don't use Entourage. Just Word and Excel.

frdmfghtr · Nov 23, 2007, 07:46 PM

Originally Posted by hempcamp

Go for it! It's a great deal today only -- you can get Office 2004 Student/Teacher for $30 after rebate and then a free upgrade to the special Media version of Office 2008 (when it comes out, $7 for shipping).

IMO, Office is the only professional word processing option on the Mac (or anywhere else for that matter). NeoOffice and Pages and AbiWord and Nisus all have their peculiarities when opening "real" Office files or saving files for someone to use in another environment. I hate Windows and pretty much everything else about Microsoft, but I do love their Mac Business Unit products!

I already have a Student/Teacher boxed set; I ordered another one today just for the sweet deal. I figure I can eBay it for a song and get the best of both worlds: a deal on Office 2008 for me, and somebody else a recent version of Office for a good price.

It is true that NeoOffice et al. have their own peculiarities, Word has one that tipped the balance in favor of NeoOffice: corrupt documents and the OpenDocument format.

The .doc format is so bloated and complicated that even Word can't deal with it on occasion. There are several documents out there that go through corrupt document troubleshooting, and they do all sorts of things: copy to a new document, try saving in a different format, etc. The .doc format is so complex (some say bloated beyond reason) that it just needs to simply go away.

I have yet to run into issues with NeoOffice regarding document corruption. I have migrated to the ODF and the issues (and in many cases, file sizes) have gone way way down. Furthermore, I've run into two bugs that deal with equations in documents; in both cases, I submitted a bug report and within a week was testing the patch that fixed the bug. Try THAT with Microsoft!

Word does have some features I would like to use, but corrupted documents is the deal-killer for me. If Office Open XML can take away those problems, I may start using it again. What I would REALLY like to see is the ODF supported by Office, but that's not likely to happen.

ghporter · Nov 23, 2007, 10:55 PM

Microsoft has basically abandoned their .doc format (and I believe all the other proprietary, code-bound formats as well) in favor of an XML format. And OpenOffice/NeoOffice both handle these new formats well according to reports, so if you have to share among users of both, you're set.

brettcamp · Nov 24, 2007, 01:36 AM

My version of Word is five years old. Today I received my first docx file. The current version of NeoOffice opened it flawlessly. What a relief! I prefer Bean and Scrivener for actual writing, but it's nice to know NeoOffice is there when I get these new-version Word files.

hempcamp · Nov 24, 2007, 02:17 AM

Originally Posted by ghporter

Microsoft has basically abandoned their .doc format (and I believe all the other proprietary, code-bound formats as well) in favor of an XML format. And OpenOffice/NeoOffice both handle these new formats well according to reports, so if you have to share among users of both, you're set.

Which is fabulous, BUT...

It always takes quite a while for businesses (particularly those skeptical of going to Vista from XP) to completely invest and switch to new technologies, meaning it's still awfully important to be able to play nice with .doc.

For $30, I'm not missing that chance.

--Chris

scattered · Nov 24, 2007, 09:51 AM

Well, I installed Office and used to it do work all day yesterday. It was much, much, much more responsive than NeoOffice, which was a big relief. Unfortunately, I'm stuck using .doc because of my computers at work; I think that NeoOffice having to import and export the filetype whenever the I opened one was a reason it was sluggish.

ghporter · Nov 24, 2007, 10:07 AM

Neo/OpenOffice do handle .doc formatted files just fine, as will the new iterations of Microsoft Office applications. The default file format for the new Office apps will be their XML-based format, such as .docx for Word, etc., but you can choose to save files in an older format if you want.

hempcamp · Nov 25, 2007, 04:14 AM

Originally Posted by ghporter

Neo/OpenOffice do handle .doc formatted files just fine, as will the new iterations of Microsoft Office applications.

Not at all for me. Recent example: some .doc forms e-mailed to me from my employer, when opened in NeoOffice, didn't quite maintain the formatting they were supposed to have (page and text breaks were off in a few places, some page elements conflicted so NeoOffice pushed them askew). Needless to say, I couldn't print the forms like that and give them back to my employer.

My older version of Office (v.X) also didn't handle them perfectly (which is why I opened them in NeoOffice instead). I ended up having to open them on another computer, where in Office 2007 they opened just fine.

--Chris

ghporter · Nov 25, 2007, 10:25 AM

Gotta wonder if there was something odd about the machine that created that document, especially if neither Office X nor NeoOffice formatted the document correctly. With all the plug-ins and customizations you can do with an Office document, I have sometimes had to specify that "all options for Word MUST be at their default settings when working on this document" to make sure that collaboration actually worked among multiple users and their different machines.