NeoOffice 3.3 Feature Comparison

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Last updated: 19 September 2012

N.B. This page compares NeoOffice 3.3 to LibreOffice 3.6 and Microsoft Office 2011. To see the version of this page comparing NeoOffice 3.1.1 with then-current versions of OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office 2008, see NeoOffice 3.1.1 Feature Comparison.

NeoOffice has many advantages over other office suites, including, in some cases, Microsoft's Office. Most importantly, NeoOffice is free and open source software, relieving you of costly licensing fees. The NeoOffice community also offers support options, including the documentation in this wiki and read-only access to the forums, where priority support is available for NeoOffice donors.

At the same time, other office suites also contain features missing in NeoOffice which may be indispensable to your work, and your purchase of commercial software generally assures the software has passed professional quality assurance and typically entitles you to professional technical support.

This page attempts to provide a balanced, but by no means complete, comparison of NeoOffice with two comprable office suites, Microsoft Office and LibreOffice, to help you make a more informed decision when evaluating office software. Some other software developers have similar comparison pages; those we are aware of are linked below.

NeoOffice vs. Microsoft Office vs LibreOffice

As an open source project, NeoOffice is free to incorporate useful code from other open source projects that corporate products often cannot use. In turn, this allows NeoOffice to react to needs of its users in ways that others are unable to match.

NeoOffice is also far more integrated with Mac OS X than the Mac releases of LibreOffice. Rather than relying on the vision and goals of the Linux developers behind LibreOffice to determine features, NeoOffice includes many features designed specifically for Mac OS X and requested by NeoOffice donors.

Apart from these benefits, NeoOffice has features that outshine Microsoft Office and LibreOffice:

Price, System Compatibility, and Version

Feature	NeoOffice 3.3	Microsoft Office 2011	LibreOffice 3.6
Price (single user, standard edition)	$10.00	$199.99	$0.00
Officially available for both PowerPC and Intel-based Macs
Minimum Mac OS X version	10.6.8	10.5.8	10.4.11
64-bit application
OpenOffice.org codebase (version)	ooo-build 3.1.1	N/A	LibreOffice 3.6
Mac OS X codebase in use since	2003	2001	2011
Bug fixes released	Weekly to biweekly	Every 2-3 months	Every 3 months

Mac OS X Integration

Feature	NeoOffice 3.3	Microsoft Office 2011	LibreOffice 3.6
Aqua look-and-feel	Good	Full	Some
Aqua-style icon set
Non-Mac keyboard shortcuts	Some	Some	Some
Standard Mac keyboard shortcuts for document navigation	Some		Some
Option key available as shortcut modifier key	Partial		Partial
Native toolbar buttons
Native context and overflow menus
Native floating palettes
Native highlighting for selections
Menus available when no document window is open
Document proxy icon in the titlebar
Ability to move or rename open documents
Document contents searchable by Spotlight			*
Quick Look support			*
High-quality Quick Look previews
Sharp, high-quality text on Retina displays		â€
Installs on Mac OS X 10.8 with Gatekeeper		â€¡
Uses Mac OS X spelling checker and dictionaries for supported languages
Uses Mac OS X 10.5+ grammar checker for supported languages
Support for magnify and swipe gestures on multi-touch trackpads
Support for using an Apple Remote when displaying presentations
Media (audio and video) support
Media browser, providing easy access to iLife images, sounds, and video	**
Image Capture support, for inserting images directly from scanners and digital cameras
Reads and writes files on AFP and SMB volumes and iDisks			Partial**
Native (styled) copy and paste support
Drag-and-drop between other applications
Support for Mac OS X Services
AppleScript support
Integrated with Finder and major mail clients
Usable with accessibility tools such as iListen, Proloquo, ViaVoice, and others		(?)
Support for the Mac OS X accessibility framework		(?)
Reads from the Mac OS X Address Book as a datasource
Reads from the Thunderbird Address Book as a datasource
Notes
* NeoOffice includes the NeoLight Spotlight Importer and the NeoPeek Quick Look importer; LibreOffice also includes a Spotlight importer. On Mac OS X 10.5, Apple includes OpenDocument Text (`.odt`) files in the file types natively supported by Spotlight and Quick Look.
â€ Requires the Office for Mac 20011 version 14.2.4 update.
â€¡ Retail version.
** LibreOffice is missing support for iDisk and webdav volumes and also is missing support for using Base `.odb` files on any remote volume.

General Features

Feature	NeoOffice 3.3	Microsoft Office 2011	LibreOffice 3.6
Type ahead word-completion (optional), similar to features found in mobile phones
A logical, safe and suite-wide system for templates, so these are never accidentally updated
Clean HTML code export (compliant with international web standards)
Support for international standard ISO 26300 OpenDocument file formats
Support for Office Open XML formats (`.docx`, `.xlsx`, `.pptx`) produced by Microsoft Office 2007 and greater	*	*	*
Unified User Interface, reducing learning time and costs
Optimized PDF generation
EPS preview, printing, and PDF export		(?)	â€
Smoother text kerning	â€¡	N/A
Online document sharing service	**	**
UI for choosing which component appears on launch		N/A
Notes
* NeoOffice and LibreOffice include support for reading and writing Word 2007 (`.docx`), Excel 2007 (`.xlsx`), and PowerPoint 2007 (`.pptx`) files using code from the ooo-build project. Office 2011 includes native support for reading and writing OpenXML file formats.
â€ LibreOffice 3.6 does not support embedding EPS files in PDF files created when using the Export as PDF function.
â€¡ NeoOffice 3.0.2 and later include text kerning improvements that result in a smoother, more uniform appearance compared to text positioning in LibreOffice.
** NeoOffice Mobile allows users to securely share NeoOffice files with other users and other computers, publish directly from within NeoOffice, and view published documents using secure connections from regular web browsers or web-enabled mobile devices (including native iOS and Android NeoOffice Mobile apps), or from NeoOffice itself. Both free and paid accounts are available; see the NeoOffice Mobile site for more information. Paid NeoOffice Mobile accounts also allow NeoOffice to open and save files from Google Docs. Microsoft's Office 365 is a paid, business-oriented suite of online office applications as well as web-based file storage that is compatible with Office 2011. Microsoft's SkyDrive is a web-based file storage service that appears to integrate with Office 2011 via a separate application and web browser plug-ins.

Internationalization and Localization

Feature	NeoOffice 3.3	Microsoft Office 2011	LibreOffice 3.6
Localized user interface and help files (number of languages)	34*	14*	109*
International spelling checkers	88â€	17â€	88â€
Support for text entry in non-Roman scripts, including South Asian, East Asian, right-to-left and complex text layout scripts		Some [1]
Supported scripts or languages:
Arabic			â€¡
Armenian
Cyrillic
Cherokee
Chinese (Simplified)
Chinese (Traditional)
Devanagari & Gujarati (Indic languages)
Greek
Hebrew
Inuktitut
Japanese
Korean
Roman (Western and Eastern European languages)
Roman (Hawaiian, Northern Sami)
Roman (Vietnamese)
Tamil		Partial[2]
Thai
Other	Likely**	Unknown	Likely**
Notes
* NeoOffice ships with UIs for US English, French, German, and Italian; UIs for the other 30 languages are freely available in language packs. Office 2011 is available in Chinese, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Polish, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish [3]. LibreOffice 3.6 is officially available in US English for Intel or PowerPC Macs, with 108 other languages available as language packs.
â€ NeoOffice uses the native Mac OS X spell-checker by default. If there is no native spell-checker dictionary available for a language, NeoOffice will fall back to Hunspell dictionaries. An ever-growing number of writing (proofing) tools for many languages are available from the OpenOffice.org project [4]. Microsoft Office 2011 ships with proofing tools for Catalan, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English (US/UK/AU/CA), Finnish, French (FR/CA), German (DE/AT/CH), Italian, Japanese, Norwegian (NB/NN), Polish, Portugese (PT/BR), Russian, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish [5].
â€¡ LibreOffice requires manual selection of an appropriate Arabic script font in order to correctly display Arabic text.
** Because the core OpenOffice.org code includes support for languages and scripts which do not have keyboard layouts in Mac OS X, and because Mac OS X includes system-level Unicode support for many of these languages even though Apple does not ship fonts or keyboards, it is very likely that NeoOffice and LibreOffice will support text entry (and perhaps sorting) in the language/script if one installs third-party Unicode fonts and keyboard layouts. See Tom Gewecke's Your Multilingual Mac for more resources. For instance, there is a report that NeoOffice handles Khmer very well, and there has even been a report of using NeoOffice with characters in Unicode Planes 1 and 2.

Word Processor

Feature	NeoOffice 3.3 Writer	Microsoft Office Word 2011	LibreOffice 3.6 Writer
A logical style system that does not invent styles based on your layout choices
Functional bullet/list numbering
The ability to import WordPerfect documents	*		*
The ability to import Microsoft Works word processing documents	â€		â€
Table drawing options	Good	Very good	Good
Notes
* Thanks to the libwpd project.
â€ Experimental support; not all versions of the format are supported and some formatting may be lost. Thanks to the libwps and ooo-build projects.

Spreadsheet

Feature	NeoOffice 3.3 Calc	Microsoft Office Excel 2011	LibreOffice 3.6 Calc
More conditional layout options for cells
Style-enabled layout system for text and cells
Support for linear programming extensions for spreadsheets	*	â€	*
Support for Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) macros	â€¡		â€¡
Notes
* Thanks to the ooo-build project.
â€ Microsoft announced in August 2011 that the Solver is available again as a stand-alone application that is downloadable for free by Excel 12.1.2 users.
â€¡ Experimental support; all macros may not work perfectly. Thanks to the ooo-build project.

Presentation

Feature	NeoOffice 3.3 Impress	Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2011	LibreOffice 3.6 Impress
The ability to export to Flash animation
Superior (3D) font art possibilities.
Support for playing QuickTime-supported audio and video
Notes

Performance Comparisons

Comparison of these office suites performing a number of different tasks can be found on the NeoOffice Performance Comparison page.

Supported File Formats

NeoOffice can read and write a large variety of file formats, both current and legacy. Current and recent Microsoft Office file formats are just some of the import and export possibilities; for a more complete listing, see the NeoOffice File Formats matrix.

Still To Do

In all fairness, NeoOffice is not perfect. No software is. Along with relatively large RAM requirements (minimum 512 MB, 1 GB or more recommended), there is always room for improvement.

Other Comparisons

Additional feature comparisons between selected office suites and word processors are available at Mellel: Competitive Comparison (redlers.com; compares Mellel 2.0 with Microsoft Office 2004, OpenOffice.org 2.0.x, and Nisus Writer Express 2.7, but not NeoOffice) and Word-Alternativen: Der Test (apfelwiki.de; compares AbiWord 2.4.5, Mellel 2.2, NeoOffice 1.2.2/2.0.3 Aqua Beta, Nisus Writer Express 2.7, and Apple's Pages 2.0.2 [de]).

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