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I have found it to be a simple-to-use, capable alternative to Word that costs nothing and offers more than enough features and flexibility that it probably does everything you need it to. DOC files, and use tools like the highlighter and word counts – OpenOffice ticks all the boxes.
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, OpenOffice is not only extremely quick and easy to use thanks to ongoing improvements and the contribution of a large volume of code from IBM's Symphony, it's compatible and close enough to Office that you may not even notice you're in the new environment.Ĭertainly, for someone with very specific requirements – all I need to do is be able to edit documents, save and send. I had tried it a few versions ago but found it woefully underfeatured as a replacement for OfM.
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But if you can't wait that long – or, like me, you find yourself without an OfM install disk – it's time to give OpenOffice another look. Rumour has it that the next version of Office for Mac will bow early next year – prompting many to upgrade, no doubt, even as the memory of now-unsupported Office 2008įades. These differences are often significant: it was only with the latest version, for example, that the Mac version of Office was given Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) scripting capabilities after years of conspicuous absence.
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Despite its name, Office for Mac is a rather different productivity suite than Office for Windows – with a different interface and a different feature set. Mac users, however, have a different decision set. OpenOffice 4.0 works like Word but looks like Pages. Business users know Office and have it available to them as a matter of course, while home users probably get it through student bundles or the like. OpenOffice has been around for some time, but despite heroic efforts by its developers it has struggled to gain a massive following mainly because Microsoft Office is so broadly available. Apple's determination to force it down our throats has made its latest iWork iteration less of an Office killer and something more resembling TextEdit on steroids.Īt any rate, with Pages out of the question and Office nowhere to be found, I took a chance and revisited the open-source equivalent, OpenOffice, to see if it might allow me to maintain my workflow based on the frequent loading, editing and saving of. : in the real world – the business world outside Apple's closed-garden ecosystem –absolutely nobody uses the. Little wonder the business community has been increasingly abandoning Pages and iWork

I was hoping to standardise on Pages after hearing about Apple's move to make it free, but Apple is still insisting that we use its own file format to save documents. If you work with a lot of documents, the double-handling rapidly grates on you. pages files – which are, inexplicably, often 10 or more times larger than their Word. That's right: the only way to handle documents in Pages is by saving your working documents as. Previous versions of iWork had promise as an alternative, but I have a long-running feud with Apple over iWork for one simple reason: Apple refuses to give it the ability to simply load and save files in Word's. So, as you can imagine, when I set up a new computer I like to have a writing tool that works whether I'm online or not. While cloud-based alternatives are getting better all the time, I'm a traditionalist who has used local productivity applications since the days of Wordstar.
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and Microsoft's Office 365 gaining momentumĮven as the company puts free versions of Office in the cloud
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There has been a lot of movement in the office-suite market of late, what with Apple releasing Pages, Keynote and Numbers for free Google Docs popular but still outage-prone Microsoft Office may be rusted onto the corporate office worker's psyche, but many Mac users will find OpenOffice just as capable. When recently setting up a new iMac with Mavericks and I couldn't locate that OfM install disk, however, an act of desperation turned into a new modus operandi after I realised that our open-source allies have made the world's most widely used office suite nearly irrelevant. Old habits definitely do die hard, which is probably why I have dutifully pulled out the Microsoft Office for Mac (OfM) install disk every time I've reformatted or upgraded one of the many Macs I've set up and kept running over the years.
