April 09, 2008

Instant warm, fuzziness from NeoOffice

If you have not purchased Word 08 for Mac, do yourself a huge favor and have a look at NeoOffice, now in version 2.2.3. We are now buying Macs at our church with no worries about extra expenses for Office products. I'm simply deploying NeoOffice. It moved me to make a donation today, and not only did I feel good about supporting the project, but received such a sweet autoreply:

Thank you for your donation to NeoOffice. As a result of generous contributions from people like yourself, we are able to fund many of the operating expenses that are required to keep the NeoOffice project running. Your contributions will be used to help us to continue providing valuable services to the NeoOffice community such as free downloads, frequent releases, bug fixing, and support and testing forums.
Have I mentioned that I think NeoOffice is a very good solution? The toolbar icons are a little clunky for me, but the functionality here is just great, will get greater.

12 comments:

FreeG said...

You can make the icons smaller: In Extras>Options>View.

Unknown said...

In Tools::Options::NeoOffice::View you can change not only the icon size, but also the icon set itself to Crystal, which is a much nicer set, in my opinion.

Unknown said...

Thanks for such a nice plug for NeoOffice. I've used it for two years now, and I love it. The styles and templates features make it a snap to put a worship bulletin together.

There's also a great support forum and a growing wiki, both of which can be reached from the main link. (Disclaimer: I am on the forum moderating team and I'm a wiki editor for the project; both are volunteer positions).

The developers are working on a media browser that should be out soon.

Lorinda

Unknown said...

I've switched to NeoOffice too, and can't believe how good it is! I found a nice replacement for the toolbars here:
http://www.macseven.com/files/20070412_a_great_new_icon_set_for_neooffice.html

and a beautiful set of icons and splash screens can be found here:
http://leonico.deviantart.com/art/MS-NeoOffice-mac-70156605

Roger Mugs said...

the only drawback is that NeoOffice should cease to exist by open office version 3. They are making their own OSX port... which I am really looking forward to.

That said, I'm currently a user of neooffice and have been for almost 3 years now...

Unknown said...

Just to clarify....the NeoOffice developers don't intend to shut down when OpenOffice.org 3.0 comes out. Plans are to port the 3.0 code when it becomes available.

OpenOffice.org is working on an Aqua version. Only time will tell what effect that will have on the NeoOffice project.

Joe Weaks said...

Thanks for the toolbar customization tips.
There are several downsides to NeoOffice, some of which are deal-breakers for me personally. As such, I can't use NeoOffice as my standard WP in particular.

But I didn't focus on those because for many, especially a typical church office, NeoOffice will be a slick solution.

Unknown said...

Just out of curiosity Joe, what are the "deal-breakers" for you?

Joe Weaks said...

mark,
I said I didn't want to pick on features absent. :)
I script constantly, even while simply working in a wp. No Applescript or VBA in the wp feature is something I can't do without. I don't use Mellel either for this reason.
I do academic work, and need more sophisticated bibliographic software integration.
I think I posted on this a long time ago... and some of the features that were lacking may be updated.

Unknown said...

I've just started playing around with Zotero, an amazing research tool that functions as a plugin for Firefox. It allows you to collect, manage and cite research sources. Better yet, it works in conjunction with NeoOffice allowing you to import references in almost every style. Check it out if you haven't already.

Unknown said...

And I wish I knew enough AppleScript for non-scriptable applications to be a problem :-)

Joe Weaks said...

Just a note, that Zotero, while cool and useful I agree, is not in the same league as functionality for Bookends/Endnote/etc.