Hello Tony, I'm going to be upfront and honest with you. At the moment, NeoOffice is a far better recommendation than the Aqua build of OpenOffice.org, which is still very early in development (and realistically will not be ready for large-scale deployment any time soon). You will find that NeoOffice and OpenOffice.org are virtually identical in terms of features (including the aforementioned spreadsheets and graphs/charts), and NeoOffice has had the advantage of being under development and testing for much more time.
Of course, no one can predict how this balance will be in a year's time, but at the moment, your only viable open-source options are NeoOffice and the X11 version of OpenOffice.org. I use both regularly, and find that they are both very reliable and powerful applications, which are more than suitable for large-scale deployment such as this. In the meantime, these outstanding developers are doing their best to bring a stable, feature-complete, Mac-native OOo to market as soon as possible. ~Mike, a loyal NeoOffice/OOo user and tester for over three years On 6/5/07, Shaun McDonald <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Hello Tony, Your mail was moderated. Please subscribe to the Mac porting list to get all responses and post without moderation. http://porting.openoffice.org/servlets/ProjectMailingListList http://porting.openoffice.org/servlets/SummarizeList?listName=mac On 6 Jun 2007, at 01:07, Tony Webster @ RED wrote: > Hello > > > > I am the GM of Renaissance Education Division in New Zealand and > are the > sole distributor of Apple computers into New Zealand schools. > Great > > > Recently the New Zealand government made the decision to not supply > Microsoft Office for classroom Apple computers in New Zealand. This > has > been greeted negatively by many NZ schools and the government has > asked > us to help them in sourcing an alternative product for NZ > classrooms. We > have been made aware of NeoOffice, however it has a number of > limitations particularly in the high end spread sheeting functions. > > > > This morning I spoke to the open office rep in NZ, Graham Lauder who > told me that there is a project underway to develop and deploy an Aqua > version of Open Office for Mac OS X. > There is a stable version of OpenOffice.org for Mac OS X, however it requires X11. The aqua version is only at an alpha stage, and is available for testing now. > > > I have a number of questions > > > > 1. When is it expected to be due for release We have just released the first aqua development snapshot. http://porting.openoffice.org/mac/news/2007/20070605firstaqua.html As the vast majority of the developers are volunteers, it can be a little difficult with planning. Also we don't know exactly how much work there is still to do. We are aiming for a beta release towards the end of the year. With a final stable release in the first half of 2008. Further development will continue to improve the OpenOffice.org experience on Mac OS X after the stable release. > 2. Will it provide high end spreadsheeting options including > macros, graphing functions (trend lines) It will include all the same features as OpenOffice.org on other platforms. In terms of graphing functions you may be interested in: http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS/entry/new_chart_module_is_integrated and http://openoffice.blogs.com/openoffice/2007/06/the_new_openoff.html which explains a bit about the new chart tool which is coming in ooo 2.3. OpenOffice.org already has its own BASIC scripting macro language. > 3. Would we be able to test the release versions as they come out. We create regular milestones of the X11 version that are available from ftp://ooopackages.good-day.net:21/pub/OpenOffice.org/MacOSX/ These are always available for testing. The aqua builds will be coming as new features are added and bugs are quashed. With more developers, these features will be implemented and bugs fixed a lot faster. > > This is a high priority for us as the schools have to have Mac for > Office removed by the end of the year and we need a viable alternative > well before then so we can train schools on the use > There are a number of schools that are already using the X11 version of OpenOffice.org successfully. [...] Shaun
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