As title - currently using a pre intel version of MS Office on my MBP, which whilst OK, is running through rosetta and seems to take an age to do anything.
No idea, but Office 08 is no better than 04 in terms of speed - it's UB too (C2D 2.2 with 2GB of RAM)
It's better than Open Office in my experience but still pretty crash happy I found. Although this was a few years back I'm sure it has improved by now.
So open office - bad, neo office - better? I'm not keen on X11 apps.... That was why I was asking about neo. Having said that, Open Office have an Aqua-fied beta for download...
Can't hurt to try, I use Open office on the windows platforms, my teacher uses it on her powerbook g4, no problems with either one, she recommended it
I seem to one of those rare people who have 0 problems with either Office 2004 or Office 2008. 2004 is faster on my 550mhz iMac G4 (on an iMac G3 data bus) than on my 2.6ghz C2D MBP, but 2008 is not only faster, but extremely stable. Weird. NeoOffice, OpenOffice, and a couple others are all about the same - I've found that different builds/revisions/patches provide large fluctuations in speed and stability. YMMV, but NeoOffice seems to be pretty good right now.
OpenOffice will be aqua native - http://www.tuaw.com/2008/05/08/openoffice-org-3-for-mac-beta-is-available/ - currently available in beta Might not be best for mission critical stuff though
Being using Office 04 for ~3 months. It's slow and bloated, especially when compared to 2003 for Windows. Excel is probably the worst - I've lost count how many times it has crashed on me. Although it's rubbish, I think it's probably better than running 2003 via Parallels or Fusion. I have no idea how 2008 compares.
Rosetta is slow and less reliable than a Universal Binary program on Intel Macs. If you want to shell out the $100-$150USD for the Home and Student version of Office 2008, then have some fun. Otherwise, NeoOffice and OpenOffice will be much faster (again, YMMV, this is only what I've noticed). BTW, I find it amusing that the difference between Home and Student Edition and Standard Edition, other than 2-3x the price, is Exchange support, Automator support, and of course the ability to use it in businesses. Funnier still is the difference between that and the Special Media Edition, which for another $100 adds "Expression Media," a rebranded iView, which is essentially a media browser for all of your files. Unless you are a business/require Automator/Exchange, Home and Student Edition is a great deal. Plus, I still have the triple license keys for my Office 2004 installs, so that's 3 discounted upgrades!
Been using Neo Office and it's rock stable from my experience. Just moved to Pages 08 however and it's so much better to use.
'03 and '07 aren't on mac. I wish 2008 didn't look so 2007-esque, though. Ooh, yeah, I definitely forgot about iWork! Keynote is PHENOMENAL, Powerpoint has nothing on it. Numbers is definitely much better-looking than Excel, and (I find) easier to use. Pages is great for fancy documents, and the new version of Pages is clean enough to be used for word processing (the last version was too shiny, I always got distracted by fancy gubbins ). Use iWork if you can!
I support about 100 and some Macs, from G3 iBooks up to C2D iMacs. About 60-70% of those use Office, mostly 2004, a few v.X. For it's faults '04's not that bad (assuming you don't use Entourage, in which case all bets are off). Must have been around 2yrs ago when I took all the hooky Office '98 installations out, which my predecessor had used to provision Office for the other 30-40% who make up artwork type roles, and replaced it with NeoOffice. Can honestly say I don't recall getting any negative feedback about it in that time. So yea, I would absolutely recommend it. In addition I just recently gave up my Office license to somebody else as an excuse to get stuck into the OOo beta (had used it in the past through X11, but couldn't do with the faff). It's crashed a couple of times, but seems stable enough. One issue with both NeoOffice and OOo is compatibility with any version of Office. You'll be able to read the files just fine but formatting may occasionally go out the window (but I'll have words with anyone chooses Office formats for document distribution!). Again, just recently I saw a document that had historically been edited (and created) in '04 have all it's bullet points turn into tiny clapper boards when I opened it in OOo.
Office 08 is good: When it works. I've found it to be rather bad when used in conjunction with leopard. It switches spaces by itself, it won't open new documents without being able to have another document minimized, it won't let you keep office in one space and go surf the internet in another; when you do that, it switches spaces, moves things to other spaces, keeps the formatting window open in one tab while your document is another, follows you around, etc. Shame, I like it a lot more than office 07 for windows.
I used neoOffice for a while (almost a year ago). It was functional, but slow and didn't always work the way I'd want it to. I never really had problems with stability. iWork 06 and Office 04 were both ok, but I couldn't justify spending money on them. Then iWork 08 came out, and I bought it instantly. It is perfect for me, but I hear Office 08 is on par (or close to) with iWork. In short, NeoOffice will be always kinda slow and ugly. Not to be a mac snob, but it 'feels' like a windows program. But it'll work just fine if you're okay with that and don't feel like shelling out for a word processor.
My vote goes to iWork. If you're constantly working with Office documents then just stick with Office for the sake of compatibility (iWork 08 tends to be pretty good that way but you'll run into issues once in a while). Just typing? Just use TextEdit. Seriously, it's quite a bit more functional than Notepad/Wordpad - hell, it opens up Office 07 documents just as well as Pages (and presumably Office 08). Alternately, Scrivener looks like a good choice. There are quite a few "specialty" writing apps for OS X, several of which are listed at the bottom of that page (anyone who tells me why I may be better off with competing products gets the nod for commitment to customer satisfaction in my books). I actually use Google Docs for a lot of things these days. I have several tools to keep versions in check between systems, but that doesn't address software compatibility so a browser-based solution is great for me. I wouldn't use it to write a book, but I've got pages of various notes and project ideas - it's an absolutely fantastic collaboration tool.
Oh, and if you're doing simple little things then Bean is a really cool little program with limited word compatibility (it'll read the files, but the formatting will be off).
