Last week I made the switch from NeoOffice to OpenOffice for Aqua on the Mac.
I’m impressed with the overall appearance of the application, and the functionality. Most importantly, I was able to process Word documents with templates without problems and without loss of functionality.
The application is very fast and responsive on my PowerPC laptops, and from what I’ve read elsewhere, it’s actually better on the Intel-based machines. It doesn’t have the lag that I’ve found with newer versions of NeoOffice when clicking on a menu item and the menu contents displaying. Nor does it seem to absorb as much of the machine’s resources.
I can open and work on several different types of documents, at the same time, and not have performance or stability problems. Overall, it’s quite efficient, as well as including all the features most, if not all, of us need from an office toolset.
OpenOffice includes the following tools:
- A fully featured text document editor, including support for both macros and templates, as well as all features necessary for sophisticated document creation and management. You can also track and show changes, as well as autocorrect and format, embed tables and images, add a media player, and incorporate a bibliography database.
- A spreadsheet tool that provides any number of formatting capabilities, simple to use chart creators, all the spreadsheet functions you need and want, and some interesting Scenario and Solver tools I haven’t had a chance to explore.
- A presentation tool with templates that can incorporate any number of graphics and themes, providing slideshows, the ability to package the presentation— the usual presentation software suspects.
- A database creation tool that also uses ODBC and JDBC to connect to an existing database, either remotely or locally.
- A drawing tool that provides a good deal of functionality in order to create nice looking illustrations.
The application is still in candidate release status, so you may want to wait until the finished release. However, if you’re a Mac user, with either a PowerPC or Intel-based machine, give the application serious consideration.
Did I happen to mention it’s open source?
