Thread: Neo office: Alternative to MS office

This is free and open source the clone of openoffice for Mac OS X. It had too released it new version simultaneously NeoOffice 3.0.2. It has all the features of openoffice and some added functionality. For those not wanting to safe the money and need an alternative for MS office should consider this and koffice.
It also have a official support feature where donors can get support quickly. Also it can be used using mobiles like iphone. You can download and upload documents but there's a limit of 10mb and your data will be deleted after 48 hours. To get your data back you will have to give 10$ . To increase the limit to 100mb and permanently able to use it you will have to pay 10 $ per month. You can share your document via mobile and they are encrypted while transferring.

limit for the data which can be attached is low and cost for upgrading are too much.

MS office is the best software.

iWork is the best!

I had used both NeoOffice and OpenOffice in Intel-MacOSX 10.3 (Panther), and found that both of them were identical, except for the Logo Sign and the License Agreement (Sun/GNU);
Moreover OpenOffice supports an extra plugin support from other libraries such as mono/dotgnu, etc for implementing certain specific roles.
This is because unlike Excel, Powerpoint and Access, the Wordprocessor which looks easiest to operate -- but when the Word contains embedded images (or for even the password protected ones), its decoding from other softwares becomes the most difficult of all -- so a mono/dotgnu support for OpenOffice Textprocessor makes this job easily done (however, it might not be impossible without mono/dotgnu unlike what it currently looks like).
In case of linux, only a mono-plugin-bridge for OpenOffice is sufficient for doing the job; in case of windows, we should use GOOpenOffice instead of direct OpenOffice; in case of MacOSX, we should download the source-code for mono-plugin-bridge and compile before bringing a similar Linux like effect for MacOSX.
Unfortunately, I had later replaced my i586 machine in favor of a rather imperially-designed i686 machine where the only MacOSX capable of being installed is Intel-MacOSX 10.6 SnowLeopard.
So I couldn't try this out and verify whether this activates the facility of only OpenOffice or of NeoOffice too.
(if the difference is due to widgets (netbeans/jboss+ejb (bean, swing, jfc), eclipse/spring+glassfish (swgi, gtk2-java, gtk#, wxjava, wx#, qt-jambi, qt#), etc), then probably fetch different results, otherwise for other differences they should fetch identical results in all).
However, I have reverified the OpenOffice from Ubuntu, Mandriva and Sabayon (and also the GOOpenOffice from WindowsXp) and in all these cases can able to use the word documents with embedded images too.

On the other hand just like there are both gnu-emacs and aqua-emacs, if neo-office is openoffice customized more better for aqua desktop interface (i.e. cocoa-java, cocoa#, etc), then in that case NeoOffice should be completely identical to OpenOffice while opening the Word Document having embedded images.
Otherwise the darwinports based open graphical interface uses the old carbon interface (old pascal based toolkit classes) instead of new cocoa (objective gcc based toolkit classes designed to be made compatible with carbon). So, Java in MacOSX can be implemented from three native toolkits -- 1) open toolkit route (gtk, wx, qt-jambi), 2) jigs (objective-java) and 3) native bean -- but since the bean is not only inbuilt in java, but also the macosx itself, java in macosx runs faster than windows and linux.
(but however MacOSX10.6 has probably replaced the Bean with PyObjC (pycocoa) as soon as the gcc (and also fpc) has replaced the old pascal), and the new jigs project plans to bring the JavaObjC (cocoa-java) type fulfilment required due to Bean's replacement.

Due to identical speed and performance, I think NeoOffice vs OpenOffice is more likely to be the darwinport based variation of cocoa vs carbon based customization differences (like the aqua-emacs is for gnu-emacs) than the native Bean (java) implementation.

OpenOffice (and NeoOffice) is slower than MSOffice, but in MacOSX the speed difference should anyway be much less than that observable under Windows
(i.e. both are true: MSOffice speed slower in MacOSX than Windows and OpenOffice/NeoOffice speed faster in MacOSX than Windows).

I you are in windows and looking for more speed then use GoOpenOffice instead, which due to its mono based dependencies running on top of the basic framework (i.e. OpenOffice itself), gives the speed somewhere in between OpenOffice and MSOffice.

However, if you are in MacOSX (or Linux), to enhance the speed in a similar way, then you just need to download and compile the extra mono libraries (pertaining to the GoOo for MacOSX/Linux).

The net result is an accelerated speed using the same OpenOffice (and may be the NeoOffice too, as it appears to be that way), but if you are a beginner then this exercise would be more easily done from Linux than MacOSX.

The good thing about OpenOffice/NeoOffice is that after the crash, data can be recovered in a more user-friendly interface than the analogous one provided by MSOffice>=2007 (but unrecoverable for <=2003, etc).

In my MacOSX10.3, although I had both OpenOffice and NeoOffice suites, after checking both I settled for OpenOffice whenever the NeoOffice hanged, but this does not mean that the latter crashes frequently -- since I think MacOSX should be able to endure things better than windowsxp at least.

We can do vlookup for 65,000 records, or countif/sumif for 48,000 records, or simultaneously work on 16 spreadsheet (xls) files plus 8 impress (ppt) files plus 8 textprocessor (doc) files all three factors simultaneously combined in OpenOffice in windows better than MSOffice 2003 does but less than MSOffice 2007.
The total no of rows in xls for both MSOffice and OpenOffice is 65,000 as compared to 10,00,000 for msoffice 2007; but the total no of columns for OpenOffice is as much as MSOffice 2007 supports (and thus more than MSOffice 2003).

Of course when the load was very high then the performance slowed down, but MSOffice 2003 was not better either.

MSOffice 2007 was very fast but the facility of xlsx with 10,00,000 rows was not crash-proof and hence useless, which I always preferred MSAccess.
Occassionally the OpenOffice Base (OpenAccess) can also be used like MSAccess, such as queries (DQLs, DMLs, etc).
The only difference is it does not have the import file wizard and uses the clipboard paste for input (which MSAccess disallows and crashes).