Effective Mac - Using OpenOffice, NeoOffice and/or iWorks08
Finally! OpenOffice is now available for the Mac. In the last two month I used OpenOffice 3.0, NeoOffice 2.2.5 and iWorks08 in parallel (with a special focus on the presentation functionality).
The result is surprising (and maybe not :)). If you use the "native" formats (e.g. ODF, .key/.page) everything works fine. Obviously things get more interesting, if you want to use these tools to read and write MS-Office files (.ppt/.doc/.xls) or even MS-Office 2007 files (.pptx, etc.).
In this case it is my experience that you (still) have to limit yourself to a (non-obvious) subset of the functionality to make sure you can import/export your files to/from MS-Office. Especially for Powerpoint 2007 files I currently have to use all three tools and see, which tool will give me the best result, when I import .pptx files. In some cases entire slides show up blank. In other cases they are "reformated" in a way that makes them unreadable.
Buttom line: It seems that for the time being, neither OpenOffice nor NeoOffice is a solution on its own, when it comes to importing/exporting to/from MS-Office. But that may change in the future.
posted by Roland Tritsch at
12:19
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1 Comments:
Roland your experience matches mine; for me, PDF is the only real medium of exchange for documents that is going to work!
I'm adopting the philosophy that, in general, there are more readers than authors, and so the author should choose his tool of choice and then share using PDF. Fellow authors can always pitch in if they want, but will have to match the tools of the leading author.
With this in mind I've decided to use OpenOffice for all my new text and presentation slide documents - it provides open formats, seems reliable, and anyone can download the tool for free to edit.
I've had it up to here (Ade places his hand about a foot over his head) with MS Office crashing on me, even on the Mac!
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