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Mac OS X  |  Business / Productivity  |  Office Suites  |  NeoOffice  |  Good: free, lots of functions; Bad: still slow and some critical drawbacks...

NeoOffice

NeoOffice

Office suite based on OpenOffice.org.

Version:  3.0.1

   [ Views: 1009 ]

Good: free, lots of functions; Bad: still slow and some critical drawbacks...

Feedback Type:  Commentary

Contributed by: vkrejci Saturday, February 11 2006 @ 11:42 AM PST

Product Platform: MacOSX

Used Product For: Over One Year

Getting better, lots of functionality... but for me still not a serious alternative to MS-Office. Main criticisms:

1. Spreadsheet and Presentation are very slow. For example, it takes forever to load a complex spreadsheet with multiple sheets, graphs and calculations. This is not acceptable, whatever the reason is, and in particular not for software that otherwise offers similar functionality as Excel.

2. Still no support for plugins like EndNote, used by many scientific writers. There is a workaraound but which is not acceptable if I need share documents with coauthors that use MS Office with EndNote.

3. Conversion of Excel Spreadsheets with graphs is not satisfactory. Again, If NeoOffice is intended to be an alternative to MS Office, problems like this are not acceptable, unless it clearly outperforms MS Office otherwise.

Obviously, this software is written by highly motovated people that are idealistic enough not to ask money for it. I have already donated, and I would be among the first to spend more money for this software once these drawbacks are corrected. I think that it's great to have free software, however, if productivity suffers, it might not be the best alternative.   

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Comments

3 comments |

Good: free, lots of functions; Bad: still slow and some critical drawbacks... - JKT

Wrt to no.2 - this is not anything that either NeoOffice developers or OpenOffice.org developers can do anything about. The manufacturers of Endnote are the people to complain to... if they weren't so blinkered they might actually realise that there is a demand for their software for use with something other than just MS Office.

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Sunday, February 12 2006 @ 04:55 PM PST


Good: free, lots of functions; Bad: still slow and some critical drawbacks... - JKT

What I meant to say was - the support for the Office with the Endnote plug-in comes from the developers of Endnote, not MS. It is up to Endnote to support other software, not the other way around.

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Sunday, February 12 2006 @ 04:58 PM PST


Good: free, lots of functions; Bad: still slow and some critical drawbacks... - vkrejci

I have sent a comment to EndNote support...

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Sunday, February 12 2006 @ 08:11 PM PST