Office Suite of Choice...

T

tyma

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I'm looking for some input here. I know this is really close to the thread about alternatives for Office:v. X, but I figured it was different enough to receive it's own thread.

Currently I have Office: v.X, OpenOffice 1.0.3, and Appleworks 6 on my eMac. I'm looking to find out which of the three is your favorite suite, and why.

Thanks,
Tim.
 
Personally, I think AppleWorks is garbage.

OpenOffice is free, open-source, and that's very cool...

But in terms of functionality, I prefer Microsoft Office v.X

BUT, I like AbiWord as a general-purpose word processor; it's faster than OpenOffice, and has almost all the functions I need for say typing a letter or a short assignment...
 
Ok, having switched from PC about a month ago, I think this is the area where the Mac is lacking in options:

OpenOffice - very promising, but it runs SO slow on my iBook. And I don't want to run an ugly X11 program on my Mac.

AppleWorks - terrible. Looks old and I can't even see any way to create multiple worksheets in the spreadsheet app?!

Microsoft Office X - unfortunately, I don't have enough money to purchase this office suite. I'm sure it's excellent, but it seems kinda pointless buying a Mac and then running Microsoft software on it. Might as well have kept my PC.

ThinkFree Office - slow because it's programmed in Java and apparently has a few problems importing MS Office docs.

Mariner Write & Calc - Carbon applications. Not bad, but look dated and a lot like Appleworks. Plus you have to pay $139.95 for the bundle.

An Aqua version of OpenOffice is predicted to be available by quarter 2 of 2004 (according to their website). Once this is available, it will be my office suite of choice. Until then, I'm stuck using the X11 version!

Of course, there are rumors of a new version of Appleworks, but as I understand it, this is only speculation.
 
The "TextEdit" application included with OS 10.3 betas has been confirmed to have the ability to open Word's ".doc" files. Apple has something up it's sleeve. ;)
 
Here's some recent observations of mine regaring office suites - particularly the word processing components.

I just created a two-page, table-intensive document (if you don't mind a bit of geekiness, the document is here - the missing borders on some of the cells is a result of PDF'ing the document... the source doc has all the borders intact) and tried to work with it in Word v.X, AppleWorks 6, and OpenOffice 1.0.3.

As far as GUI/look and feel/human interface is concerned, Word v.X takes the cake. Having fully embraced Aqua, it is a beautiful application. As far as looks are concerned, neither AppleWorks (which still has remnants of MacOS 6-7 throughout) nor OpenOffice (which keeps the X11 interface) can stack up at all.

The document was originally created in Word v.X. Opening the document in AppleWorks resulted in different colors of shading (yellow instead of grey), one table per page (instead of multiple tables over two pages), and rotated text becoming oddly unrotated. Tables, rows, columns, and individual cells all lost their sizing, and often appeared stretched out two to three times their size. Opening the document in OpenOffice was much better, save that the font types and sizes were altered, and the rotated text was made unrotated. I absolutely could not correct the document in AppleWorks, and was able to correct it after many tries with OpenOffice.

As far as speed is concerned, AppleWorks seemed to be a bit snappier than Word, but OpenOffice had a REALLY slow load time - it has to load up the X11 environment, then all the X libraries, and so on, and so forth. Once it was running, however, it seemed to keep up with the other two.

All things considered, so far my money is on Word v.X. The only problem I had with Word was that it just up and crashed twice while I was working with it, and the other two did not. Both times it crashed were directly after doing print previews, and I have no printer installed in my system. When I stopped doing the previews, or started again after installing a printer, Word did not crash at all. So beware of that, Word users.

Tim.
 
Originally posted by johnnyutah2k1
I'm sure it's excellent, but it seems kinda pointless buying a Mac and then running Microsoft software on it. Might as well have kept my PC.
Click to expand...

Hmm. I disagree completely. Microsoft is a software company. Apple is a hardware company. So far, it's looking like MS has the best office suite out there - why not run the best software on the best hardware and operating system?

Maybe it's just me, but I also recently moved from a PC. I didn't move to avoid Microsoft, I moved for the reliability of the Mac hardware and the best darn OS there is.

Tim.
 
Office v.X End of story. I do not even acknowledge the others as existing.

To be honest, though, for me it's all about compatibility. I need to be able to send doc/xls/ppt file to and fro with my PC cohorts, so even if I did prefer the other suites, I'd be sticking with v.x

From what I have used of them, V.X is still the hands down winner. I'm hoping Apple develops the rumored iDoc or whatever the name of that suite was that would theoretically be compatible with Word and Excel. I would love to switch just in principle.
 
You have a point, although Microsoft obviously has a vested interest in encouraging people to use its Windows OS and PC's rather than OS X and Mac's. The distinction isn't quite so clear cut as software (Microsoft) and hardware (Apple).

The one thing I can't stand is the constant speculation about Microsoft discontinuing Office for Mac - I'd rather use OpenOffice knowing that the developers are fully committed to supporting it. That said, if I could afford MS Office I would probably buy it because it is the best Office Suite available for the Mac.
 
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