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NeoOffice 2.2.5 Feature Comparison
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Revision as of 04:18, 14 September 2008
N.B. This page compares NeoOffice 2.2.5 to OpenOffice.org Aqua 3.0rc1 and Microsoft Office 2008. To see the version of this page comparing NeoOffice 2.2.4 with then-current versions of OpenOffice.org (X11) and Microsoft Office 2008, see NeoOffice 2.2.4 Feature Comparison.
The advantages of NeoOffice over other office suites, particularly Microsoft's, are legion. Most importantly, NeoOffice is free and open source software, relieving you of costly licensing fees. There is also a strong community support forum that is frequented by the developers
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 OpenOffice.org, 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 OpenOffice.org Aqua
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 OS X than the Mac releases of OpenOffice.org. Rather than relying on the vision and goals of Sun Microsystems to determine features, NeoOffice includes many features designed specifically for Mac OS X.
Apart from these benefits, NeoOffice 2.2.5 has features that outshine Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org Aqua:
Price, System Compatibility, and Version
| Feature | NeoOffice 2.2.5 | MS Office 2008 for Mac | OpenOffice.org Aqua 3.0rc1 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price (standard edition) | $0.00 | $399.95 | $0.00 |
| Runs on Intel-based Macs | Natively | Natively | Natively |
| Universal Binary (single application that works on both PPC and Intel Macs) |  |
 |
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| Runs on Mac OS X 10.3.9, 10.4.11, and 10.5.x | |
* |
* |
| OpenOffice.org codebase (version) | 2.2.1 | N/A | 3.0rc1 |
| Mac OS X codebase in use since | 2003 | 2001 | 2008 |
| Notes: | |||
| * Microsoft Office 2008 requires Mac OS X 10.4.9 or later. The official Mac OS X version of OpenOffice.org Aqua 3.0rc1 is officially available in English for Intel Macs running Mac OS X 10.4 or higher. To check availability for your language and hardware (PPC or Intel), look here. Unofficial builds, builds for other languages, or older versions that support more languages, may or may not be available. |
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Mac OS X Integration
| Feature | NeoOffice 2.2.5 | MS Office 2008 for Mac | OpenOffice.org Aqua 3.0rc1 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Aqua look-and-feel | Good | Full | Good |
| Aqua-style icon set | |
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| Non-Mac keyboard shortcuts | Some | Some | Some |
| Standard Mac keyboard shortcuts for document navigation | |
? | Some |
| Option key available as shortcut modifier key | |
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Partial |
| Native toolbar buttons | |
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| Native context and overflow menus | |
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| Native floating palettes | |
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| Document contents searchable by Spotlight | |
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* |
| Quick Look support | |
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* |
| High-quality Quick Look previews | |
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| Uses Mac OS X spelling (and grammar, on 10.5) checker and dictionaries for supported languages | |
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| Support for magnify and swipe gestures on multi-touch trackpads | |
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| Media (audio and video) support | †|
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| Media browser, providing easy access to iLife images, sounds, and video | †|
(?) |
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| Image Capture support, for inserting images from scanners and digital cameras | †|
? | |
| Reads and writes files on AFP and SMB volumes and iDisks | |
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Partial‡ |
| Native (styled) copy and paste support | |
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| Drag-and-drop between other applications | |
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| AppleScript support | |
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| Integrated with Finder and major mail clients | |
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Partial** |
| Usable with accessibility tools such as iListen, Proloquo, ViaVoice, and others | |
(?) |
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| 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; OpenOffice.org Aqua also includes a Spotlight inporter. On Mac OS X 10.5, Apple includes OpenDocument Text (.odt) files in the file types natively supported by Spotlight and Quick Look. | |||
| †Mac OS X 10.4 and higher required for video support and the Media Browser. | |||
| ‡ OpenOffice.org is missing support for iDisk and webdav volumes and also is missing support for using Base .odb files on any remote volume. | |||
| ** OpenOffice.org Aqua is not able to successfully perform all of the "email document" functions listed in its menus. | |||
General Application Features
| Feature | NeoOffice 2.2.5 | MS Office 2008 for Mac | OpenOffice.org Aqua 3.0rc1 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Type ahead word-completion (optional), similar to features found in mobile phones | |
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| A logical, safe and suite-wide system for templates, so these are never accidentally updated | |
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| Clean HTML code export (compliant with international web standards) | |
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| Support for international standard ISO 26300 OpenDocument file formats | |
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| Support for Microsoft Office 2007 (OpenXML) file formats | * |
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Partial* |
| Unified User Interface, reducing learning time and costs | |
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| Optimized PDF generation | |
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| EPS preview and printing | |
(?) |
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| Notes: | |||
| * NeoOffice includes support for Word 2007 (.docx), Excel 2007 (.xlsx), and PowerPoint 2007 (.pptx) files using code from the odf-converter project. Office 2008 includes native support for reading and writing OpenXML file formats. OpenOffice.org Aqua inculdes support for opening these document types but not for saving them. | |||
Internationalization and Localization
| Feature | NeoOffice 2.2.5 | MS Office 2008 for Mac | OpenOffice.org Aqua 3.0rc1 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Localized user interface and help files (number of languages) | 58* | 11* | 92* |
| International spelling checkers | 88†| 12†| 88†|
| 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 | |
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‡ |
| Armenian | |
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| Cyrillic | |
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| Cherokee | |
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| Chinese (Simplified) | |
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| Chinese (Traditional) | |
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| Devanagari & Gujarati (Indic languages) | |
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| Greek | |
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| Hebrew | |
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| Inuktitut | |
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| Japanese | |
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| Korean | |
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| Roman (Western and Eastern European languages) | |
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| Roman (Hawaiian, Northern Sami) | |
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| Roman (Vietnamese) | |
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| Tamil | |
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| Thai | |
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| Other | Likely** | Unknown | Likely** |
| Notes: | |||
| * NeoOffice only ships with a UI for English; UIs for the other 57 languages are freely available in language packs. All versions of Office 2008 are available in Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Spanish, and Swedish [2]. OpenOffice.org Aqua 3.0rc1 is officially available in English for Intel Macs, but unofficial versions are available in 92 different single-language builds; see this list. |
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| †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 [3] using the Dictionary wizard (in the File menu, choose Wizards, then "Install new dictionaries..."). Microsoft Office 2008 ships with proofing tools for Danish, Dutch, English (US/UK/AU), Finnish, French (FR/CA), German (DE/CH), Italian, Japanese, Norwegian (NB/NN), Portugese (PT/BR), Spanish and Swedish [4]. |
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| ‡ OpenOffice.org Aqua 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 OpenOffice.org Aqua 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 2.2.5 Writer | MS Word 2008 for Mac | OpenOffice.org Aqua Writer 3.0rc1 |
|---|---|---|---|
| A logical style system that does not invent styles based on your layout choices | |
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| Functional bullet/list numbering | |
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| The ability to import WordPerfect documents | * |
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* |
| The ability to import Microsoft Works word processing documents | †|
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| Table drawing options | Good | Very good | Good |
| Notes: | |||
| * Thanks to the libwpd project. | |||
| †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 2.2.5 Calc | MS Excel 2008 for Mac | OpenOffice.org Aqua Calc 3.0rc1 |
|---|---|---|---|
| More conditional layout options for cells | |
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| Style-enabled layout system for text and cells | |
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| Support for linear programming extensions for spreadsheets | * |
†|
(?) |
| Support for Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) macros | ‡ |
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| Notes: | |||
| * Thanks to the ooo-build project. | |||
| †Microsoft announced in August 2008 that the Solver is available again as a stand-alone application that is downloadable for free by Excel 12.1.2 users. | |||
| * Thanks to the ooo-build project. | |||
| ‡ Experimental support; all macros may not work perfectly. Thanks to the ooo-build project. | |||
Presentation
| Feature | NeoOffice 2.2.5 Impress | MS PowerPoint 2008 for Mac | OpenOffice.org Aqua Impress 3.0rc1 |
|---|---|---|---|
| The ability to export to Flash animation | |
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| Superior (3D) font art possibilities. | |
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| Support for playing QuickTime-supported audio and video | * |
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| Notes: | |||
| * Mac OS X 10.4 and higher required for video support. | |||
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. NeoOffice can (and will) get better.
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]).
