Windows MS Office documents on OSX

richieboy

richieboy

richieboy

Associate
Joined
29 Dec 2004
Posts
2,253
Rightio, stupid question.

My friend is looking to replace his home office PC with a Mac Mini.

The only thing he is worried about is the fact he receives lots of Powerpoint presentations, Word documents, etc and would like to know if he can view these on a Mac without having to purchase MS Office for Mac which is around £300.

Does anyone know if OpenOffice is any good for OSX as an alternative for him? He basically wants to do everything he can on his PC on a Mac Mini for as cheap as possible as he's a tight fisted mother :p

Thanks
 
Since he already has a license for Office for Windows, he should really just install Parallels and run the native version. He then won't have to worry about incompatibility at all.

OO.o for OS X requires X11 and is something of a hack. NeoOffice is an OS X-native port of OO.o. It is very good at opening most Office documents. I use OO.o on my Linux machines and I've rarely had any docs created on Windows that I couldn't open.
 
I use NeoOffice as my main (and only) office suite for OS X and its superb, i have a licenced version of MS Office 2003 that I use in Boot Camp for MS Access, but NeoOffice is perfect for what I need and i've never had any problems with it.

If he's looking for a free alternative to Office, NeoOffice is the one to go for :)
 
OpenOffice is currently working on a fully native version for OS X (NeoOffice replaces the X11 with Java or something IIRC), which should be out in the next few months :D
 
Fillado said:
OpenOffice is currently working on a fully native version for OS X (NeoOffice replaces the X11 with Java or something IIRC), which should be out in the next few months :D
Click to expand...

Ooh, thanks for the heads-up - NeoOffice is pretty glitchy and VERY memory-hungry, I've found. A clean, native version of OpenOffice would be excellent. I'll keep an eye out for that :)

arty
 
There's so many options isn't there? I currently use MS Office 2003 in Parallels but it's a bit annoying not being able to open files from Finder (if you know what I mean).

I too will be keeping an eye out for this native version of Open Office - I found Neo Office pretty decent but a bit slow to load and a bit of a resource hog. It's a shame I have to share files with people otherwise I would just use Apple iWork.

Edit

Or there's always Google Apps - that's starting to look a bit exciting!
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom