The OpenOffice Project has sent a letter to Michael Dell, showering praise on Dell's chairman and CEO and asking him to consider pre-loading OpenOffice onto PCs. The letter is the result of a flood of requests on Dell's online suggestion box, IdeaStorm, for Dell PCs pre-loaded with both Linux operating systems and the open-source suite of desktop productivity applications. John McCreesh, marketing project lead for OpenOffice.org, also asked Dell to consider making a financial contribution to the software's development.
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Member since:2005-11-14
Have you tried copying files between Microsoft Word for Windows and Word for Mac? A most frustrating experience.
Only last night I was fighting font metrics, where Word for Mac used a totally different set of metrics, messing up the layout. I've had vector images mangled too. NeoOffice worked perfectly, identical to Word for Windows and OpenOffice.org.
Which do you prefer, perfect results after a few seconds longer startup time, or hours tweaking the documents to make them look correct again?
Member since:2006-01-15
I've never had a problem. I use as my primary machine a Powerbook running OS X 10.4 and my office suite is MS Office 2004. I exchange MS Office documents with my WinXP boxes running Office XP and I have one running Office 2003. No problems. I have people in my office running a variety of MS office suites. No problem there either.
If you are running MS Office X (mac), then I could see a problem. It wasn't the best port. 2004 hasn't given me or anyone I know any problems.
Member since:2005-07-07
I've never had this problem when sharing Word files between Windows and Mac OS X. On the other hand, Word documents have a tendency to show up with strange formating in NeoOffice and the Word documents it saves have don't look like they should (i.e. they look different in NeoOffice and MS Word).
If only NeoOffice would produce perfect results, that may excuse the sluggish performance. Sadly, it doesn't.
Member since:
2005-07-07
Have you used OO on OS X? If so you will know the reason for that. If you're talking about plain vanilla OO, then you'll need X11. That means the fonts don't look right, the keybindings are all wrong, and the dialogs just look out of place.
At this point, someone will point out NeoOffice. NeoOffice is better, it uses Aqua (via the Java bridge) for rendering and this has two main benefits. No need for X11 and font rendering is much better. The NeoOffice team have also started using native looking Mac OS X dialogs and the keybindings are inline with what you'd expect from Mac OS X applications.
However, this is where people will start to disagree. I personally think the NeoOffice looks alien on the Mac OS X desktop. Why? Look at those tiered toolbars. More and more applications are moving to using floating palettes as these work better at handling the complexity of modern day word processors. Take a look at Word 2004 for example. Not only that, I think it speaks volumes about how far NeoOffice has yet to go when MS Word 2004 loads and feels more snappy compared to NeoOffice on my Macbook. This is significant, because NeoOffice is compiled for Intel (yes, I downloaded the Intel version) while MS Office is running in Rosetta emulation. One can only imagine what this performance delta will be like when a native Intel version of MS Office is released.
Preloading OpenOffice onto OS X will never happen, until OpenOffice improves to the extent that it becomes a viable competitor to MS Office. This can only happen when people who are OpenOffice fans pump money into the native Aqua port or hope for the day Apple gets involved.