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Office Suites for Mac OS X | View information about Office Suites for Mac OS X within our Technology Website Directory section by reviewing this area of our website. We provide a wealth of information online to help our visitors become better informed about Computer Buzz. |
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Office Suites for Mac OS X
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The most popular office suite for the Macintosh is certainly Microsoft Office After all, both MS Word and Excel made their debuts on the Mac and were later ported to Windows. But it is a fact that Mac users tend to be suspicious of anything that comes out of Redmond, Washington. So, MS Office does not enjoy the obscene software monopoly amongst Appleheads that it does with WinDOS zombies. There's no shortage of good office suites for the Mac; all of them except for MS Office, of course are affordable, and a couple of them are free.
Let's take a quick look at the field.
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Apple iWork
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iWork is a suite of applications created by Apple Inc., containing Pages, a word processing and desktop publishing application, Keynote, a presentation package and Numbers, a spreadsheet application.
Although iWork is billed by Apple as "a successor to AppleWorks," it does not replicate the functionality of AppleWorks' database and drawing tools. Likewise, it does not compete directly with the Mac version of Microsoft Office, but instead offers tools with a different focus (presentation, rather than analysis) at a far lower price ($79 versus $480). It is designed to integrate with existing applications from Apple's iLife Suite. Although iLife comes free on every Mac, iWork is sold separately. A free 30-day trial of iWork is provided with every new Mac, and with copies of iLife.
iWork '08 was announced on August 7, 2007. New versions of Pages and Keynote were introduced, as was a new spreadsheet application, Numbers. Despite this, hard disk space requirements were reduced from 1.85 GB in iWork '06 to 690 MB in iWork '08. iWork '08 marked the end of AppleWorks which was discontinued a week later.
Computer Buzz loves iWork and does not hesitate to recommend it to all Mac users. At the moment, it is available only for Mac OS X. There is probably no point in porting this suite to Windows, but Computer Buzz would like to suggest that Apple consider bringing out a version for Linux.
Official Website: www.apple.com
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Microsoft Office2004/2008
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Office was introduced by Microsoft in 1989 on the Apple Mac, with a version for Windows coming along in 1990. Initially a marketing term for a bundled set of applications, the first version of Office contained Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and Microsoft PowerPoint. Additionally, a "Pro" version of Office included Microsoft Access and Schedule Plus. Over the years, Office applications have grown substantially closer with shared features such as a common spell checker, OLE data integration, and Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications scripting language.
The current version is Office 2008 for Mac. It includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Entourage (a contact/email client that is actually superior to Outlook, its Windows equivalent).
Computer Buzz recommends MS Office for Windows, although we wish it were a bit more stable. Both Word and Excel--especially Word--have an infuriating tendency to quit abruptly for no apparent reason. And we wish it were a helluva lot more affordable; an MSRP of $480 is little short of highway robbery. Moreover, we are not entirely happy with Microsoft's decision to keep the Word and Excel file formats secret and proprietary. This forces other software publishers to have to reverse engineer their products to be more-or-less-but-not-exactly compatible with Microsoft's. We much prefer the OpenDocument format.
Official Website: www.us1.trymicrosoftoffice.com
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OpenOffice.org
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OpenOffice.org (aka OOo or OO.o) is a free software office suite available for multiple operating systems including Linux, Windows, MacOS X, Solaris, FreeBSD, OpenVMS and IRIX. It supports the OpenDocument standard for data interchange, and can also read and write files from other common office software packages including MS Office.
This package is informally referred to as "Open Office," but project organizers report that this term is a trademark already registered, thus requiring them to adopt the clumsy "OpenOffice.org" as its formal name.
OpenOffice.org is based on StarOffice, an office suite originally developed in Germany and acquired by Sun Microsystems in August 1999. The source code of the suite was released in July 2000 with the intention of reducing the dominant market share of Microsoft Office by providing a free, open, high-quality alternative.
Computer Buzz finds that OpenOffice.org is easy to learn, and if you have ever used another office software package, you'll take to OpenOffice.org right away. If you already have files from another office package, OpenOffice.org will read them with no difficulty.
Best of all, OpenOffice.org can be downloaded and used entirely free of any license fees, because it is released under the GNU Lesser General Public License. This means you may use it for any purpose domestic, commercial, educational, or whatever. You may install it on as many computers as you like. You may make copies and give them away to family, friends, students, and employees, anyone you like.
OpenOffice.org has four main components:
1) Writer is the word processor.
2) Calc is the spreadsheet.
3) Impress is the presentation package.
4) Draw is the tool to create graphics and drawings.
At a cost of zero, OpenOffice.org may very well be the one single most valuable software deal in all of cyberspace. Computer Buzz can not recommend this program loudly enough.
Official Website: www.OpenOffice.org
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NeoOffice
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NeoOffice is a fork of the free/open source OpenOffice.org office suite, originally developed for Solaris and Linux that is ported to Mac OS X. It implements nearly all the features of OpenOffice.org, including a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation program, and graphics program. NeoOffice is currently the more "Mac-like" of the two, with easier installation, better integration into the OS X interface (with pull down menus at the top of the screen, and familiar keyboard shortcuts), use of Mac OS X's fonts and printing services, and integration with the Mac OS X clipboard and drag-and-drop functions.
This suite is developed by Planamesa Software, and uses Java technology to integrate OpenOffice.org with the Aqua interface of Mac OS X. NeoOffice currently runs in an X11 environment and requires either X11.app or XDarwin to be installed, although an Aqua version is nearing release.
Because NeoOffice is based on OpenOffice.org, there is a delay, often several months, between those periodic releases and corresponding versions of NeoOffice.
As of December 2008, the latest version of NeoOffice is 2.2.5 and is available for both Intel- and PowerPC-based Macs. It sports a redesigned interface using Apple's Aqua design elements, giving it an appearance more like other Mac OS X software. Version 3.0 is expected early in 2009.
In addition to the file formats supported by OpenOffice.org, NeoOffice can import, edit, and save documents created with MS Word 2007 and can execute Excel Visual Basic macros. The current release also adds experimental support for Excel 2007 and PowerPoint 2007 documents.
Official Website: http://www.neooffice.org/neojava/en/index.php
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MarinerPak
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Mariner Software is headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota and develops professional and personal software for the productivity, writing, and creative markets. The company's best-known software products include Mariner Write, a word processor and Mariner Calc, a spreadsheet app; together they are marketed as MarinerPak. With only two apps, MarinerPak is about as small a "suite" as you can find.
Released in the early nineteen-nineties Mariner Calc and Mariner Write, are described as lightweight, but full-featured, apps for Macs only. Over the years, magazine reviews have been consistently favorable.
You can purchase the boxed software for $90, or you can download it for $80. Call us old-fashioned, but for the slight difference in price, we'd go for the box.
Computer Buzz has been using MarinerPak for a couple of years now, and we are extremely pleased with both parts of it. This powerful suite is easy to learn and easy to use. It would take a very serious power user to require more of a word processor and/or spreadsheet than MarinerPak. We strongly recommend this software, and we would like to see Mariner expand into the Linux/BSD market.
Official Website: www.marinersoftware.com
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ThinkFree Office
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ThinkFree Office by Haansoft ThinkFree Co. Ltd. is an office suite written in Java that runs on Windows, Linux, and Macintosh platforms. The package includes a word processor (Write), a spreadsheet (Calc), and a presentation program (Show). ThinkFree Office reads and writes to Microsoft Office file formats (.doc, .xls, and .ppt) and has a look and feel similar to Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint,.
Computer Buzz has evaluated this package. We like it, but we're not crazy about it. The Write program is a little clunky, and there are some line spacing problems (especially at large point sizes) that may be typeface/font-related.
ThinkFree Online is a web-based version of this same office suite.
You can think "free" all you like; the Haansoft folks are thinking "fifty-dollar bill." For that price, ThinkFree Office is a bargain.
Official Website: www.thinkfree.com/
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Evermore Integrated Office
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Evermore Software is China's leading developer of Office software. A joint venture between the Chinese and American investors, Evermore Software was founded in 2000 and currently employs over 400 software engineers. Evermore Software is one of the largest independent Java developers in the world and the biggest single project software development team in China.
The flagship product, Evermore Integrated Office, was first released in 2002 as a fully integrated Office system. Written in Java, EIOffice runs on Linux, Windows, and Macintosh operating systems. MSRP is $99.
Not yet evaluated or rated by Computer Buzz.
Official Website: www.evermoresw.com/
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Papyrus Office
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Papyrus Office is an office suite developed in Germany. It is published in German and English for Windows and Mac OS X (but not Linux/Unix), and it contains the following modules:
--Word-processing
--Desktop publishing suitable for professional applications
--Embedded spreadsheets with over 100 calculation functions
--Relational database with a powerful search engine
It can read and write in MS-Word format, as well as PDF output.
Everything you need to install Papyrus can be delivered via Internet. The Papyrus package includes the complete online help and a tutorial, a license key file and your personal installation key code. The download archive for installing Papyrus is just 5 MB (Windows) / 8 MB (Mac), thus making it one of the most compact and efficient office suites on the market.
A single user license is $99, and a double license is $165. Computer Buzz has not tested the Windows version, but we have used the Mac version, and we had problems with it. Papyrus is not our favorite office suite by a long shot, but we're willing to bide our time and give them a chance to get it right.
Official Website: www.rom-logicware.com
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602 Suite
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The oddly-named 602 Suite uses the same document formats (.DOC & .XLS) as MS Office and has the same look and feel. And you can export to Adobe Acrobat PDF (Portable Document Format) directly from any 602 Suite application for quick and easy online distribution. This package is excellent for creating, editing, and viewing documents and spreadsheets. Many of its features work the same way as MS Office.
602 Suite also includes an app to edit, restore, enhance, print, and share your photos. It's not the most full-featured office suite around, but at 40 bucks for a single-user license, it's a good deal for most folks. Eighty bucks gets you a license for three users, and 400 dollars less than the price of a single installation of MS Office gets you a license for 25 users! And each multi-user license purchased for an organization allows installation on an employee's home computer! A simple, one-time software registration is required for the entire organization.
Official Website: http://www.software602.com/products/pcs/
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