OpenOffice 3 to Provide Native Mac OS X Support
For many Mac newbie users, X11 can be a real pain.
Basically, the X11 window sytem is what OpenOffice was made for. OpenOffice, by being free, makes a perfect alternative to other office suites for the Mac, especially Microsoft’s much heralded Mac Office. So, the developers decided in September of last year to make a decent official port for the Mac.
The open source community created its own solution, a great OpenOffice fork called NeoOffice. I personally think the Ooo (I wonder how they pronounce this) project leaders have made a wise decision, we all know what forks in open source mean. Sadly, this also means the NeoOffice project will probably slowly die out, although the developers do have a large userbase at the moment. The thing is, I think OpenOffice is a great product; I just don’t trust companies sponsoring open source.
According to the official website:
“At the moment this means porting OpenOffice.org to run natively on Mac OS X. Once OpenOffice.org Aqua final is released, the team will focus on making OpenOffice.org adhere to the Apple HCI guidelines.”
Here it is running natively on my Mac. Like I said above X11 is not needed anymore, just drop it in your Applications folder and you’re up and running.
There is already a working alpha release available, and the team will continue to produce X11 builds after the final release, too, which is without doubt a very smart move.
The third version of the most popular open source office suite by Sun is planned for late 2008.
As you’ve clearly tried it, maybe you could comment on its status and stability? Or how it compares to Neooffice?
Of course, since OO (in any form) still forces you to bookmark headings by hand — cross referencing headers being something I do *all* the time — I doubt it’ll be very usable for me.
In fact, I spent the last month trying every combination of Mac word processors and reference managers and was forced, very reluctantly, to fall back on Word 2004. For lack of an option that supports all the vital features (for technical writing):
1) Full support for styles.
2) Round tripping to word format (where both Nisus and Mellel fall down).
3) Automatic captioning for figures (where Pages falls down) and numbering for sections.
4) Works with at least one decent reference manager (where Word 2008 falls down — has its own but if used then it won’t fully round trip with older Word versions).
5) Easy and fast cross referencing to headers and figures (where OO falls down).
As well as the following ‘nice-to-have’ features:
6) Either support for outlines or ability to easily move entire sections. OO and Mellel do this fairly well.
7) Comments and change tracking. Pages does this best, along with Word. OO is capable, but not amazing.
i’d also love to see a performance evaluation (launching apps and opening set numbers of docs etc) between openoffice, office2008 and iwork on older macs and new intel macs…
Thanks for your comments.
Petem, as for the performance, don’t forget it’s an alpha; consequently, it doesn’t work very well in comparison to NeoOffice.
I’m waiting for the beta, I’ll probably post some test results then
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Does any one know what word processor for mac will work well with Turabian? I have been trying to find on and no luck just yet.
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I’m sticking with NeoOffice for the foreseeable future, from the alpha it looks like OO native has quite a way to go and the last thing I need is a buggy word processor bombing out in the middle of a document.
It’s going to take a LOT of performance for me to walk away from NeoOffice, it’s been stable and the dev team has been amazing about constant updates and improvements.
Pete: You can insert cross-references to headings: Insert > Crossreference > then select Headings in the left list.
You may be interested to try out the latest development preview, which is a vast improvement on previous builds.
Any sensible person doing technical writing uses LaTex. Word is a poor substitute, whichever iteration you use.
@Pete.
First up, everything for you seems to depend on “round-tripping” back to Word so obviously your processes require you to use Word not OO, a bit harsh to criticise software that isn’t Word for not being Word.
Secondly, if you’re a technical writer whose documentation needs to be accessible, you should consider .ODF as your standard, not .DOC Microsoft is constantly changing the DOC standards as you have discovered with 2008.
I hope this Mac OO works well, I mean full credit to NeoOffice devs but I never liked that program very much.
For me, technical writing always implied use of LyX. I’ve done my B.Sc. thesis with it ~7 years ago, and then my M.Sc. thesis ~2 years ago. I’ve used it exclusively for all of my homework for about 3 years. It’s a great LaTeX frontent, and runs on all major platforms (Windows, OS X, Unixen). I’ve never had any real problems as far as bibliography is concerned. There are numerous bibliography database editors you can use with LyX, and it integrates pretty well.
thank 4 openoffice