Tech Review: NeoOffice 2.1 for Mac OS X

NeoOffice 2.1 is like Microsoft Office but for the Mac OS X and without the huge price tag. As a matter of fact, NeoOffice is free. It is an open source software package under the GNU General Public License. The best part about this is that updates are available frequently.

NeoOffice is fully integrated with Mac features and is compatible with some of the versions of Microsoft Office. It consists of a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, database and drawing programs. Although is claims to be compatible with the Microsoft Office, it doesn't provide perfect compatibility since it isn't compatible with Office 2007.

OpenOffice.org users will find the new features of NeoOffice helpful. Just some of the features are: Mouse wheel scrolling; drag-and-drop with other applications; Agua menus, buttons, and icon set; international keyboards and input methods; PDF generation; normal Mac fonts; reading from the Mac OS X Address Book for a data source; supports linear programming extensions for spreadsheet; works with iListen, Proloquo and ViaVoice; Spotlight support; integrated with major mal clients; copy and paste support; plus much more.

Die-hard Mac lovers will be disappointed with some aspects of NeoOffice. Coping some of the old Windows/Unix interface, NeoOffice haven't quite captured all of the look-and-feel of Mac. So far, this is the only downside that I've found with the software package. It actually feels more like a Mac application than OpenOffice.org, which was primarily developed for Windows and UNIX systems.

NeoOffice is currently being used in homes and offices for daily tasks at this very moment. It stands up remarkable to the highly priced Microsoft Office. It offers some of the same great features that organizations find resourceful in the operations of their duties.

NeoOffice offers support for other scripts and languages such as Arabic, Armenian, Cyrillic, Cherokee, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Devanagari, Greek, Hebrew, Japanese, and many others.

Writer, the word processor, has a style system that doesn't create styles based on the layout of the document. Bullet and Numbering is an option that is available. Importing WordPerfect and Works documents are also accessible and incredible easy.

Calc, the spreadsheet application, offers more conditional layouts for cells, support for linear extensions, and support for VBA macros. You will find that working in Calc is very similar to working in Excel, and if you are familiar with the latter then working in the former will be very easy for you.

Impress, which is NeoOffice equivalent to PowerPoint, has the ability to export Flash animation and use 3D font art. I was more than impressed with Impress.

For the price tag, which is free, NeoOffice is more than getting your money's worth. Don't let the similarities to the Microsoft put you off of it if you are a Mac lover. There is no doubt that NeoOffice is for the Mac.