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NeoOffice 3.1.1 Feature Comparison
From NeoWiki
N.B. This page compares NeoOffice 3.1.1 with OpenOffice.org 3.2 and Microsoft Office 2008. To see the version of this page comparing NeoOffice 3.0.2 with then-current versions of OpenOffice.org Aqua and Microsoft Office 2008, see NeoOffice 3.0.2 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 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
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 and requested by NeoOffice donors.
Apart from these benefits, NeoOffice has features that outshine Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org:
Price, system compatibility and version
| Feature | NeoOffice 3.1.1 | Microsoft Office 2008 | OpenOffice.org 3.2 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price (standard edition) | $0.00 | $399.95 | $0.00 |
| Officially available for both PowerPC and Intel-based Macs |  |
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 * |
| Universal Binary (single application that works on both PPC and Intel Macs) | |
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| Runs on Mac OS X 10.4.11, 10.5.8, and 10.6.x | |
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| 64-bit application on Mac OS X 10.6.x | |
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| OpenOffice.org codebase (version) | 3.1.1 | N/A | 3.2 |
| Mac OS X codebase in use since | 2003 | 2001 | 2008 |
| Bug fixes released | Weekly to biwkeekly | Every 2-3 months | Every 3 months |
| Notes | |||
| * The official Mac OS X version of OpenOffice.org 3.2 is officially available in English for Intel Macs running Mac OS X 10.4 or higher, and in FIXME 12 other language and CPU combinations. 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. | |||
Mac OS X integration
| Feature | NeoOffice 3.1.1 | Microsoft Office 2008 | OpenOffice.org 3.2 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 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 | ? | Some |
| Option key available as shortcut modifier key | Partial | |
Partial |
| Native toolbar buttons | |
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| Native context and overflow menus | |
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| Native floating palettes | |
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| Native highlighting for selections | |
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| Menus available when no document window is open | |
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| Document proxy icon in the titlebar | |
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| Ability to move or rename open documents | |
? | |
| 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 checker and dictionaries for supported languages | |
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| Uses Mac OS X 10.5 grammar checker for supported languages | |
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| Support for magnify and swipe gestures on multi-touch trackpads | |
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| Support for using an Apple Remote when displaying presentations | |
? | ? |
| 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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| Support for Mac OS X Services | ‡ |
(?) |
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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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| Support for the Mac OS X accessibility framework | |
(?) |
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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 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. | |||
| †OpenOffice.org is missing support for iDisk and webdav volumes and also is missing support for using Base .odb files on any remote volume. | |||
| ‡ Read-only Services are supported. | |||
| ** OpenOffice.org is not able to successfully perform all of the "email document" functions listed in its menus. | |||
General features
| Feature | NeoOffice 3.1.1 | Microsoft Office 2008 | OpenOffice.org 3.2 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 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 Office Open XML formats (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx) produced by Microsoft Office 2007 and greater | 1 |
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read only |
| Unified User Interface, reducing learning time and costs | |
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| Optimized PDF generation | |
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| EPS preview, printing, and PDF export | |
(?) |
2 |
| Smoother text kerning | 3 |
N/A | |
| Online document sharing service | 4 |
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| UI for choosing which component appears on launch | |
N/A | |
| Notes | |||
| 1 NeoOffice is no longer limited to the read-only approach associated with the relatively old ODF Converter code. The more modern OpenOffice.org 3.1.1 code, plus Go-OO modifications, allow NeoOffice to both import and export. | |||
| 2 OpenOffice.org 3.2 does not support embedding EPS files in PDF files created when using the Export as PDF function. | |||
| 3 NeoOffice 3.1.1 includes text kerning improvements that result in a smoother, more uniform appearance. | |||
| 4 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, or from NeoOffice itself. Both free and paid accounts are available; see the NeoOffice Mobile site for more information. | |||
Internationalization and localization
| Feature | NeoOffice 3.1.1 | Microsoft Office 2008 | OpenOffice.org 3.2 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Localized user interface and help files (number of languages) | 58* | 11* | 31* |
| 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 58 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 3.2 is officially available in English for Intel Macs and FIXME 12 other language and CPU combinations, but unofficial versions are available in 31 different single-language builds each for PowerPC and Intel; 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]. 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 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 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 3.1.1 Writer | Microsoft Office Word 2008 | OpenOffice.org 3.2 Writer |
|---|---|---|---|
| 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 3.1.1 Calc | Microsoft Office Excel 2008 | OpenOffice.org 3.2 Calc |
|---|---|---|---|
| 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. | |||
| ‡ Experimental support; all macros may not work perfectly. Thanks to the ooo-build project. | |||
Presentation
| Feature | NeoOffice 3.1.1 Impress | Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2008 | OpenOffice.org 3.2 Impress |
|---|---|---|---|
| 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 | |||
Performance
Comparison of these office suites performing a number of different tasks can be found on the 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]).
