The SquizLog

NeoOffice/J

For various reasons, when I purchased my iBook, I decided against paying for Microsoft Office as well. One of the was that OpenOffice.org, which I had been using on my old Thinkpad as well as at work, was available for OS X.

So I used OpenOffice.org for OS X for several months but it was never a totally satisfactory experience. The reason? Simple. When you are used to the eye candy provided by native OS X applications, an Office application based on X11 just doesn't cut it visually. It never looked good enough, wasn't integrated with the Mac menus and didn't conform to the OS X key shortcuts.

Then I discovered NeoOffice/J, which is an open source Java-based port of OpenOffice.org created by Patrick Luby and Edward Peterlin. I have been using it for the last couple of months and have been delighted. When I originally downloaded it the website contained warnings that it was beta software. Several patches have been released since but I've never experienced a problem.

A few days ago the version 1.1 release candidate was made available and declared stable enough for everyday use. So, if you're using OS X, I recommend that you give NeoOffice/J a try as an alternative to Microsoft Office.