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NeoOffice Performance Comparison
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Revision as of 18:23, 8 August 2008
N.B. Initial editing is still in progress
N.B. This page compares NeoOffice 2.2.4 to OpenOffice.org 3.0 Beta and Microsoft Office 2004 .
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 http://trinity.neooffice.org/
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's performance with two comparable 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
Apart from these benefits, NeoOffice 2.2.4 has features that outshine Microsoft Office:
| Feature | NeoOffice | MS Office 2008 for Mac |
|---|---|---|
| General: | ||
| Price (standard edition) | $0.00 | $399.95 |
| Runs on Intel-based Macs | Natively | Natively |
| Universal Binary (single application that works on both PPC and Intel Macs) |  |  |
| Document contents searchable by Spotlight | | |
| Type ahead word-completion (optional), similar to features found in mobile phones | | |
| Support for magnify and swipe gestures on multi-touch trackpads | | |
| 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 Microsoft Office 2007 (OpenXML) file formats | * | |
| Support for voice-dictation and similar software | | (?) |
| Unified User Interface, reducing learning time and costs | | |
| Media browser, providing easy access to iLife images, sounds, and video | | (?) |
| Localized user interface and help files (number of languages) | 58†| 11†|
| International spelling checkers | 88‡ | 12‡ |
| 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 | | |
| 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 | | |
| Thai | | |
| Other | Likely** | Unknown |
| Writer (word processor): | ||
| A logical style system that does not invent styles based on your layout choices | | |
| Functional bullet/list numbering | | |
| The ability to import WordPerfect documents (thanks to the libwpd project) | | |
| The ability to import Microsoft Works word processing documents (thanks to the libwps and ooo-build projects) | ††| |
| Calc (spreadsheet): | ||
| More conditional layout options for cells | | |
| Style-enabled layout system for text and cells | | |
| Support for linear programming extensions for spreadsheets (thanks to the ooo-build project) | | ‡‡ |
| Support for Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) macros (thanks to the ooo-build project) | ††| |
| Impress (presentation): | ||
| The ability to export to Flash animation | | |
| Superior (3D) font art possibilities. | | |
| Support for playing QuickTime-supported audio and video | *** | |
| Notes: | ||
| * NeoOffice 2.2.4 includes support for Word 2007 (.docx), Excel 2007 (.xlsx), and PowerPoint 2007 (.pptx) files using code from the odf-converter project. | ||
| †NeoOffice 2.2.4 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]. | ||
| ‡ NeoOffice 2.2.4 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]. | ||
| ** Because OpenOffice.org 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 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. | ||
| ††Experimental support; VBA: all macros may not work perfectly; Microsoft Works documents: not all versions of the format are supported, and some formatting may be lost. | ||
| ‡‡ Microsoft announced the Solver will return to Excel 2008 by September 2008. | ||
| *** Mac OS X 10.4 and higher required for video support. | ||
NeoOffice vs. OpenOffice.org for Macintosh (X11)
NeoOffice is far more integrated with OS X than the Mac releases of OpenOffice.org. Rather than relying on X11, NeoOffice uses Java and Cocoa to bridge the gap between the OpenOffice.org interface code and Apple's OS X.
| Feature | NeoOffice | OpenOffice.org for Mac (X11) |
|---|---|---|
| Uses your normal Mac fonts (no conversion required) | | |
| Smooth font display (Quartz anti-aliasing) | | |
| Allows international keyboards and input methods | | Partial |
| Switches keyboards and input methods along with your Mac | | |
| Optimized PDF generation | | |
| Native Aqua menus | | |
| Native Aqua open & save dialogues | | |
| Aqua buttons, checkboxes, and scrollbars | | |
| Native floating palettes | | |
| Aqua-style icon set | | |
| Native Mac OS X printing | | |
| Native (styled) copy and paste support | | |
| Drag-and-drop between other applications | | |
| Normal Mac keyboard shortcuts (⌘ key) | | * |
| Mouse wheel scrolling | | |
| Support for magnify and swipe gestures on multi-touch trackpads | | |
| Integrated with Finder and major mail clients | | Partial†|
| Spotlight support | | ‡ |
| Quick Look support | | ‡ |
| Uses Mac OS X spelling (and grammar, on 10.5) checker and dictionaries for supported languages | | |
| Reads from the Mac OS X Address Book as a datasource | | ** |
| Reads from the Thunderbird Address Book as a datasource | | |
| Usable with accessibility tools such as iListen, Proloquo, ViaVoice, and others | | |
| Media support | *** | |
| Media browser, providing easy access to iLife images, sounds, and video | | |
| Reads and writes files on AFP and SMB volumes and iDisks | | Partial††|
| Support for Microsoft Office 2007 (OpenXML) file formats | | |
| Support for linear programming extensions for spreadsheets | | |
| Support for Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) macros | | |
| Support for Microsoft Works word processing documents | | |
| OpenOffice.org codebase (version) | 2.2.1 | 2.4.1‡‡ |
| Runs on Mac OS X 10.3.9, 10.4.11, and 10.5.x | | ‡‡ |
| Runs on Intel-based Macs | Natively | Natively‡‡ |
| Notes: | ||
| * Available only with certain settings in Apple X11, and the control key may not work as expected. | ||
| †Finder integration provided by a small AppleScript wrapper. | ||
| ‡ NeoOffice includes the NeoLight Spotlight Importer; users of OpenOffice.org must build and install the importer themselves. On Mac OS X 10.5, Apple includes OpenDocument Text (.odt) files in the file types natively supported by Spotlight and Quick Look. | ||
| ** This feature was expected in OpenOffice.org 2.3 but is not present in that release. Presumably it will appear in a future OpenOffice.org release. | ||
| *** Mac OS X 10.4 and higher required for video support. | ||
| ††OpenOffice.org is missing support for iDisk and webdav volumes and also is missing support for using Base .odb files on any remote volume. | ||
| ‡‡ The official Mac OS X version of OpenOffice.org is available as separate binary downloads for several languages; builds of OpenOffice.org 2.4.1 are available in Danish, Dutch, English, German, Portuguese (PT and BR), and Swedish for Intel Macs and in German, Portuguese (BR) and Swedish for PowrPC Macs and run on Mac OS X 10.4.x and higher. To see which version is available for your language and hardware (PPC or Intel), check here. Builds for other languages, or older versions that support more languages, may or may not be available. | ||
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. Take a look at the following comparison:
| Feature | NeoOffice | MS Office 2008 for Mac | OpenOffice.org for Mac (X11) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Non-Mac keyboard shortcuts | Some | Some | Some |
| Table drawing options | Good | Very good | Good |
| Aqua look-and-feel | Good | Full | None |
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]).
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.
