Office Alternatives?

[philbowell]

I have a little dilemma heading my way and I'm hoping you guys can help me make a decision about it. When I clean installed Leopard on my iBook I lost my installs of all my applications. Now as my iBook is my secondary machine, it didn't matter but I now need a Word Processor for when I go away next month.

I've been using Google Docs (for my domain) but I'm starting to feel uncomfortable with my reliance on Google (email, docs, calendar etc…), which coupled with my lack of internet access for those couple of weeks means it's not an ideal solution.

So I'm looking for some solutions. I'm aware of OpenOffice and NeoOffice but I wondered if anyone had any experience with them and could give me some feedback? Or if anyone knows of some alternatives?

It would be helpful if it had an Excel alternative, but it's not essential at the moment.

[houltmac]

I haven't personally used them, but I know we have used NeoOffice at work. I know that OpenOffice was the first choice, but that we ditched it last minute for some technical reason though I don't remember why exactly. All the guys that have used NeoOffice seem happy with it.

Personally, I use TextEdit a lot, as well as iWork a fair bit also. I really enjoy (that's right, enjoy) using Pages and Numbers, and when the need arrises I use Keynote knowing full well that I will decimate all other speakers that day. I love that feeling, and always end up the talk of the group (though I must admit that I pretty much stay clear of public speaking whenever possible none the less).

I'd really consider iWork. It's only £55 and that is a true bargain. You will never go back.

[philbowell]

iWork did cross my mind. But I need a new battery for the iBook as well, and I can't afford both (bought a Tom Tom on a whim at the beginning of the month) so I think the battery is gonna win. I might consider it. Do Apple still do the 30 day trial for iWork? Might let me postpone the purchase by a month.

[baseballboy828]

A 30 day trial is available for iWork. I highly recommend it; it's much more polished than NeoOffice.

[Yuiichi]

Another vote for iWork here. I only have '06 but I truly adore Pages. It takes a little getting used to moving from Word (especially Inspectors) but once you do, everything is just a little better in all the right places.

[Galley]

You gotta love iWork!

[jcbeatty]

I'd suggest taking a look at Nisus Writer Express and Nisus Writer Pro, too (Nisus Software - Multilingual Word Processing for Mac OS X). They're not free ($45 & $79, resp), but they're darn good. Very nice implementation of named styles, for example.

[strummer5]

Throw me in for another iWork vote. I'm the IT manager at a small charter school (roughly 250 students +50 faculty & staff) and I made a major push last year to get it licensed for the school. We were using NeoOffice for the students and teachers but it was far too crash prone at the time (version 2.2.2/2.2.3) . It gets more stable with each patch, but iWork just blows it away. I've been experimenting with the new beta of OpenOffice.org 3.0 which no longer relies on X11 to run. So far it seems much more stable than NeoOffice, but I still prefer the polish of iWork. You can read and export all of your documents to MSWord/Excel/Powerpoint files, so you get the cross compatibility that you need.

Now, if I could just convince the school's administration to abandon MS Office...but I digress.