Apart from these benefits, NeoOffice/J 1.1 has features that outshine Microsoft Office:
Feature | NeoOffice/J | MS Office 2004 for Mac |
General: |
Price (standard edition) | $0.00 | $349.95 |
Type ahead functionality (optional) like many mobile phones have | YES | No |
A logical, safe and suite-wide system for templates, so these are never accidentally updated | YES | No |
Clean HTML code export (compliant with international web standards) | YES | No |
Unified User Interface, reducing learning time and costs | YES | No |
Localized user interface (number of languages) | 40* | 7* |
International spelling checkers and localized help | 61** | 12** |
Support for text entry in non-Roman scripts including South Asian, East Asian, right-to-left and complex text layout scripts | YES | Some [1] |
Supported scripts or languages: |
Arabic | YES | No |
Armenian | YES | No |
Cyrillic | YES | YES |
Cherokee*** | YES | YES |
Chinese (Simplified) | YES | YES |
Chinese (Traditional) | YES | YES |
Devanagari & Gujarati (Indic languages) | YES | No |
Greek | YES | YES |
Hebrew | YES | No |
Inuktitut*** | YES | YES |
Japanese | YES | YES |
Korean | YES | YES |
Roman (Western and Eastern European languages) | YES | YES |
Roman (Hawaiian, Northern Sami) | YES | YES |
Roman (Vietnamese) | YES | No |
Thai | YES | No |
Other | Likely**** | Unknown |
Writer (word processor): |
A logical style system that does not invent styles based on your layout choices | YES | No |
Functional bullet/list numbering | YES | No |
The ability to import WordPerfect documents (thanks to the libwpd project) | YES | No |
Calc (spreadsheet): |
More conditional layout options for cells | YES | No |
Style-enabled layout system for text and cells | YES | No |
Impress (presentation): |
The ability to export to Flash animation | YES | No |
Superior (3D) font art possibilities. | YES | No |
Notes: |
* NeoOffice/J ships with UIs for 12 languages; the other 28 are freely available in language packs. Office 2004 is available in English (all versions of Office 2004), and in French, German, Italian, Japanese, Spanish and Swedish (for some versions of Office 2004; must be ordered separately) [2]. |
** NeoOffice/J includes help files and a growing number of writing (proofing) tools for many languages from the OpenOffice.org project [3], [4], [5], [6]. Microsoft Office 2004 ships with proofing tools for English, French, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, German, Danish, Swedish, Portuguese, Finnish, and Dutch [7]. |
*** You must use the Caps Lock key to enable syllabics. |
**** 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/J 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/J handles Khmer very well, and there has even been a report of using NeoOffice/J with characters in Unicode Planes 1 and 2. |