erm, no i wasn’t meaning that neooffice was cheaper that OOo, I was saying it is cheaper than MS Office.

NeoOffice = OOo for Mac. Period.

OOo = NeoO

all happy 9and not a MicroSofty in sight )
b

i second your observations. when i saved up all my hard-earned cash and bough a Powerbook, I figured I’d use MS Office.

I looked at OpenOffice for Mac, which currently needs to be run with X11 for Mac.

Since then, I have moved over to NeoOffice (http://www.neooffice.org/), which is an implementation of openOffice sans X11 requirement.

All the same apps as OpenOffice, and oh, about ?300-400 cheaper.

If you know anyone using OS X, tell them about NeoOffice.

rgrds,
bernard

Your experience was very similar to my own. I installed OpenOffice as an interim measure before getting a copy of MS office. I never bothered, and stuck with OOo.

As for Calc — I do up my tax return every year in Calc and send it to my (MS using) accountant. No problems with macros or formatting.

The OASIS open standard compliancy of OOo XML documents also opens up all sorts of exciting potential for integration with other desktop and web based applications, removing the proprietary barriers. OOo is scriptable in most of the well-established OSS scripting languages such as Ruby and Perl. My guess is that there will be a proliferation of useful user-contributed plugins for OOo, much as there has been for the Firefox browser.

With the porting of Evolution to Windows and projects like Hula on the horizon, there is no actual need to have MS software at all anymore, and with no sacrifice in functionality.

What really interests me is the implications for Government spending. Informally, OOo is already on trial at the OPW with potential savings of hundreds of thousands of euro in licencing fees. Apply that to all of the central government departments and your’e talking about very significant sums. Since Microsoft is a major employer in this country, it’s proponants are strong and many within government departments, so these potential savings are unlikely to happen overnight. Pity. The health service, etc., could use the cash.

There is the wider issue, addressed in Peru by legislation a few years ago, which questions the use of proprietary formats for the storage of citizens’ data. Why should the citizens of a country need to pay for proprietary software to view data which effectively belongs to them? Go over to PublicJobs.ie and there’s very little that isn’t in Word format.

Mark

PS: When your previous poster, Bernard, talks about NeoOffice being 300-400 cheaper than OpenOffice.org, is he saying that you get paid to use NeoOffice? OpenOffice.org is Free.