On Sat, Nov 14, 2009 at 12:43 PM, Greg Schoettmer <[email protected]>wrote:
> Hi folks. Thanks to all who offered advice about Open Office. My > experience was NOT good (I'm being polite...). My daughter brought home a > file from a presentation that she started at school in Open Office on a PC. > I tried to open it in PowerPoint on a Mac (G5 iMac/10.4) - no luck - and > then downloaded Open Office. While the presentation of the application > looked familiar, nothing seemed to be easy. It looked like a warmed over > application from DOS, redone for Windows. > The NeoOffice folks have been pounding away on their port for years now while the "official" Open Office port is only months old and still looks an awful lot like the the Linux Open Office. NeoOffice behaves pretty much like a real Mac program. NeoOffice uses the OpenOffice insides with a Mac front end written in Java. Because of this, it can be a little slow to open. Once it's open, it works fine. I just leave it open all the time. Since I don't give talks, I don't use the presentation part of NeoOffice. But, I do use the word processor, database and spreadsheet every day. It opens and saves Word and Excel files almost flawlessly and talks to MySQL much better than any Microsoft product. It will, of course, have trouble with Excel macros. I find both the word processor and spreadsheet to be very powerful—as powerful as their Office counterparts, for my uses. They are not the same as Word and Excel; they are different programs with different interfaces. This sometimes confuses experienced Office users because things don't work exactly as they are used to things working. I would frankly be surprised if the presentation program in NeoOffice is as bad as you fear. -dan PS/ Open Office and NeoOffice should have pretty much exactly the same capabilities. The difference is in the user interface.
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