[OT] Mac Office Software

[Nic Gibson]

On Aug 23, 2006, at 11:29, Dave Cross wrote:


>
> I've recently bought a new Mac Book for my wife[1] and it came  
> without any Office software installed. Well, we got a 30 day  
> evaluation copy of MS Office.
>
> My first instinct was to install OpenOffice, but the Mac version  
> doesn't look anywhere near as polished as the Windows and Linux  
> versions. It's just a port of the Unix version and therefore I  
> needed to install the Mac X Server first (why isn't that part of  
> the standard OSX installation?) and even then it looked a bit  
> clunky - it opens an xterm as it starts the X Server and (for  
> reasons that I couldn't work out) all the menus were in French. So  
> I uninstalled it pretty quickly.
>
> So what do other people use on their Macs? Is there a decent free  
> (or even cheap) office suite for the Mac? Or do I just have to bite  
> the bullet and buy MS Office?
>

You could take a look at NeoOffice - it's a derivative of OpenOffice  
but Aqua native - http://www.planamesa.com/neojava/en/download.php
Apples iWork is OK but Pages is a bit more Microsoft Publisher than  
Word and it doesn't have a spreadsheet.


>
> Any advice from the iGeeks would be much appreciated.
>


>
> Cheers,
>
> Dave...
>
> [1] And I must say that OSX 10.4 is a _lot_ nicer than the 10.2.8  
> or whatever we were running on Piers' old Powerbook. Still not as  
> nice as Gnome (IMHO), but I could get used to it.
>

It can be made nicer with a few extras too.

nic


>
> -- 
> site: http://dave.org.uk/
> blog: http://blog.dave.org.uk/
>
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