NeoOffice 2.2.5 Feature Comparison

From NeoWiki

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:

Feature	NeoOffice 2.2.5	MS Office 2008 for Mac	OpenOffice.org Aqua 3.0rc1
Price, System Compatibility, and Version:
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)
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
Mac OS X Integration:
Aqua look-and-feel	Good	Full	Good?
Aqua-style icon set
Non-Mac keyboard shortcuts	Some	Some	Some
Document contents searchable by Spotlight			?•
Quick Look support			•
Uses Mac OS X spelling (and grammar, on 10.5) checker and dictionaries for supported languages
Native floating palettes
Support for magnify and swipe gestures on multi-touch trackpads
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+++
Native (styled) copy and paste support			?
Drag-and-drop between other applications			?
Integrated with Finder and major mail clients			Partialâ€
Usable with accessibility tools such as iListen, Proloquo, ViaVoice, and others		?
Reads from the Mac OS X Address Book as a datasource		?	••
Reads from the Thunderbird Address Book as a datasource		?	?
General:
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 Microsoft Office 2007 (OpenXML) file formats	*		?
Unified User Interface, reducing learning time and costs			?
Optimized PDF generation
Localized user interface and help files (number of languages)	58â€	11â€	92â€
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
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	Likely**
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)	†â€
Table drawing options	Good	Very good	Good
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)	†â€
Impress (presentation):
The ability to export to Flash animation
Superior (3D) font art possibilities.
Support for playing QuickTime-supported audio and video	***		?
Notes:
* NeoOffice includes support for Word 2007 (.docx), Excel 2007 (.xlsx), and PowerPoint 2007 (.pptx) files using code from the odf-converter project.
† 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.
‡ 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].
** 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 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.
*** Mac OS X 10.4 and higher required for video support.
• 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 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.
++ 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.

Performance Comparisons

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

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]).

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.