Question for Macophiles

Hi All,

A know there's a few Mac users out there. I need a spreadsheet package for Auntie's Mac, so she can do her accounts stuff and send it to her accountant in an Excel spreadsheet. However she doesn't want to pay the daft money MS are asking for Excel (or Office). Has anyone had any experience with NeoOffice/J, the OS X port of OpenOffice? Especially as regards the spreadsheet package in it.

 

Mmm, tried Openoffice on mine, and despite installing X11 from Apples web site, and then installing it again from the CD, i couldn't get the thing to install (constantly asking for X11 :banghead: ) Didn't have the time nor energy to carry on with it, so back to Office on PC it is

 

Thanks for the input, but I just downloaded NeoOffice and it was a one click install. Need time to play with it, but I'm impressed.

From what I can gather NeoOffice is an offshoot project from OpenOffice which is java based rather than X11 based so effectively runs native in OS X and doesn't need X11. Initial impressions are good. Not as feature packed as MS Office (but then who cares I guess) - seems pretty slick.

http://www.neooffice.org/

 

Very cool

I'll give that a go tonight, thanks for the info/link.

That X11 thing is a total pain in the arse, so any app' that runs native is already 100% better in my opinion!!

 

Its worth a whirl. So far seem to have few problems - the interface is a little un mac like which betrays its origins, but certainly not a problem. The spreadsheet doesn't support Excel Macros, which may or may not be a problem I guess (depends what you are doing). Not a problem in my case as I only want to create simple spreadsheets that other Excel users can use, not the other way round.

Seems stable. Seems to be able to import Word files without much difficulty apart from one I had which had some drawn curved text in it (not mine a newsletter), but it was still perfectly readable.

 

Depending on how complicated her set up is, she could always use the spreadsheet in AppleWorks (which would have been bundled free if she has an iMac/iBook). Alternatively if she has children, she can always buy the student/teacher version of Office for £100.