Neo Office 2.1
Hi Tim - Allison Sheridan of the NosillaCast podcast hosted at podfeet.com here. Four weeks ago I decided to try using Neo Office, the Open Source word processor, spreadsheet, presentation and drawing program. Neo Office is based on Open Office which was created by Sun Microsystems, and then released out into the wild as an Open Source project. It was developed to work on Windows, Linux and Mac OSX. At some point the developers realized that the interface shouldn’t look the same in every operating system, it should look more like the applications native to that OS. The early versions running under OSX looked very Windows 95ish. Open Office for the Mac also ran under X-11, and it was really slow to launch.

Neo Office 2.1 in contrast is aquified - it’s very pretty and runs natively in OSX without the need for X-11. In case you don’t follow the whole Open Source thing, Neo Office is free to download and use. If you’ve tried Open Office or even Neo Office a while ago, I really encourage you to check out the latest version because it’s a pretty dramatic improvement. Neo Office comes with 5 major programs all bundled into one. Instead of opening Excel and Word as two separate applications, when you open Neo Office you have access to all five applications. This makes the initial load a bit slow, but not too bad compared to opening a lot of applications.

The five major applications in Neo Office are called Writer, Calc, Impress (or sometimes called Presenter), Base, and Draw. That’s a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, database and drawing program. If you use Microsoft Office, you know that the Mac version does not include a database program while the Windows version does include Access. With Neo Office you get a database. I’m hoping to get someone who knows how to use Access for Windows to test out Base for me to see if it’s any good, and if it can read and write Access databases. You’ll also notice from the list that Neo Office includes a drawing program. this is an important edition - I don’t know about you, but I’m always trying to draw in Powerpoint and it’s pretty dismal.

One small but important enhancement of Neo Office in Presentation is that they give us Mac users something the Windows users have enjoyed for years, and that’s the slide viewer pane down the left side. I’ve ALWAYS been jealous of the Windows guys for that, SO much easier to find the slide you’re looking for. Ironic that in this case I prefer working in Neo Office to working in MS Office because it’s as good as the Windows version.

It would take too long to go through every feature, but on my Podcast I am doing a tidbit a week describing my experiences using only Neo Office at work. I have gone for 4 weeks without MS Office, and so far no one has noticed that I’m sending files from anything but “real” office, which I see as a good litmus test for it’s usability in a Microsoft-centric environment. More importantly, I have used it in front of people to edit documents and collaborate, and even the they don’t notice that it’s not MS Office.

I should admit that I have had some issues with Neo Office. Right now I’m struggling with a document that randomly decides that it shouldn’t be single spaced. this happens on individual lines, and the problem is it’s choosing to go to LESS than single spacing so it gets all jammed up. I reported it to the forums at trinity.neooffice.org, and they’ve been really responsive to my questions so far so i expect a solution pretty soon. Neo Office does publish patches pretty frequently, so each time I’ve had an issue I’ve downloaded the patch and it goes away, so maybe patch 5 that I just downloaded will fix this one. I think they should make it a bit more obvious when you download Neo Office that you need to go get the patches though. I ran with it for about 2 weeks before I heard about the patches, and it turns out they are not included in the downloadable install file for the main program.

I also had trouble when I made a bunch of graphics like big fat arrows with words in them, and reopening the file in Neo Office showed them all messed up, squished, shrunk, moved, just a real botchup. Oddly the same file opened with graphics intact on Windows using MS Office. My next plan is to make the graphics in Draw, which is more flexible anyway, and then paste them as a bit map into Impress.

One thing you do have to do to live in a Microsoft world is change the default save options. If you don’t, they’ll be saved in the Open Document Format. It’s a little tricky to do, so you might want to head over to podfeet.com and check out the shownotes there for the detailed steps and screenshots to get that set correctly.

I’ll keep using Neo Office until I run into a show-stopper or until it in some way inconveniences someone I need to work with. If you’ve got a computer without Office on it, I highly recommend checking out Neo Office for the Mac (or Open Office for Windows) rather than spending the $150 for the home version of Office.

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