NeoOffice (OpenOffice): is it good enough to replace Microsoft Office??

[Project]

If you already have MS Office, then no. If however, you cant afford MS Office then its more than capable of being your only productivity package.

Myself I use a mish mash of apps.

Apple Mail - sleek, pretty, spotlight/iApps integration.
Pages - underwhelmed at first, but this is a GREAT word processor for a 1.0. Quickly grew on me and is perfect for my needs. Very snappy. Kills Word for WYSIWG and page layouts.
Keynote 2 - wow
Excel 2004 - better than Appleworks spreadsheet. Hoping to be able to drop this for Numbers when it arrives, purely for integration with the rest of my apps.
Hog Bay Notebook / Mori - cant see Apple delving into this market, but theres no need. Great app for collecting everything I need and for organising reports and projects

 

[maestro55]

Being the Linux freak that I am, open source software is something that I take a great interest in. I would like to learn programming in order to work with the open source movement. Part of the reason why I really like OS X is the fact that it will run these open source applications native. I have been using OpenOffice for about 2 and half years now, still on an older version. I love it, and I have been very satisfied with it. The fact that I can do work and save it as a .doc file allows me to open the work on school computers with Office.

Of course it depends on how much word processing you do and what kind of word processing you are doing. I am sure there are features that Office has that OpenOffice doesn't have yet. However, because it is open source I beleive that it will continue to improve. Perhaps one day I will help improve that piece of software. But hey it works for me, and I refuse to buy Office for any of my home machines. My dad has it on some of his windows machines, but his macs run AppleWorks 6, and my macs have ClarisWorks. Old stuff but it works.

 

[MUCKYFINGERS]

Open Office is pretty good but it's safe to say free software won't beat software you actually have to pay for. But I've used Open Office before and it's great.

 

[AtHomeBoy_2000]

I'll tell you this, I head great things about Open Office froma co-worker of mine and I didnt want to pay for MS Office for my new Mac, so I thought I'd try it out. FOr some reason Open Office 2.0 wont open on my Mac so I downloaded NeoOffice. DANG! it was great, It was like a kind of stripped down version of Word and Excel. FOr free, I'll take it!

 

[IJ Reilly]

I'll tell you this, I head great things about Open Office froma co-worker of mine and I didnt want to pay for MS Office for my new Mac, so I thought I'd try it out. FOr some reason Open Office 2.0 wont open on my Mac so I downloaded NeoOffice. DANG! it was great, It was like a kind of stripped down version of Word and Excel. FOr free, I'll take it!

Probably the reason OpenOffice won't work on your Mac is because you haven't installed the X11 windowing environment, which is required for OpenOffice. It's not OSX native, at least not yet.

 

[nichos]

Open Office is pretty good but it's safe to say free software won't beat software you actually have to pay for.

WOW, easy there! IIS is better than apache? MS paint is better than Gimp?
Anyway, I've been using open office for years now, never had any problems. It's a little slow to start up on my iBook, but once it's up, works like a charm!