Overall, a good product but it has some drawbacks. Note: I'm only evaluating the spreadsheet portion of the product and not the others.

First, it is slow (it runs native on my PowerMac G5 dual 2.3 GHz, 4GB Ram) and is noticeably sluggish compared to Excel (I ran the same spreasheet side-by-side in both apps). Resource consumption (as viewed in Activity Monitor) is approximately a 10x increase over Excel, so that might account for some of the sluggishness. Startup time is the worst. Using after it is started is acceptable but not zippy like Excel. Slower machines than mine (i.e. G3, G4) might be unacceptably slow.

Second, some convenience features found in Excel (which if you enter a lot of data matter), are missing. The cell type ahead feature in Excel provides a drop down list of all items that match what has been typed. There is no list in N.O. This slows down my data entry compared to Excel.

On the positive side the .ods files created by N.O. are up to 4 times smaller than an Excel file. This is probably due to the meta data saving by Excel.

Overall, a great feature set. Even though price is always a purchasing factor, it is a one-time saving. Performance issues linger on. Since I use Excel daily (and have for years), I'm not yet willing to sacrifice convenience.

Brian S.