Feature | NeoOffice 3.3 | Microsoft Office 2011 | LibreOffice 3.6 |
---|---|---|---|
Price (single user, standard edition) | $10.00 | $199.99 | $0.00 |
Officially available for both PowerPC and Intel-based Macs | |||
Minimum Mac OS X version | 10.6.8 | 10.5.8 | 10.4.11 |
64-bit application | |||
OpenOffice.org codebase (version) | ooo-build 3.1.1 | N/A | LibreOffice 3.6 |
Mac OS X codebase in use since | 2003 | 2001 | 2011 |
Bug fixes released | Weekly to biweekly | Every 2-3 months | Every 3 months |
Feature | NeoOffice 3.3 | Microsoft Office 2011 | LibreOffice 3.6 |
---|---|---|---|
Aqua look-and-feel | Good | Full | Some |
Aqua-style icon set | |||
Non-Mac keyboard shortcuts | Some | Some | Some |
Standard Mac keyboard shortcuts for document navigation | Some | Some | |
Option key available as shortcut modifier key | Partial | Partial | |
Native toolbar buttons | |||
Native context and overflow menus | |||
Native floating palettes | |||
Native highlighting for selections | |||
Menus available when no document window is open | |||
Document proxy icon in the titlebar | |||
Ability to move or rename open documents | |||
Document contents searchable by Spotlight | * | ||
Quick Look support | * | ||
High-quality Quick Look previews | |||
Sharp, high-quality text on Retina displays | † | ||
Installs on Mac OS X 10.8 with Gatekeeper | ‡ | ||
Uses Mac OS X spelling checker and dictionaries for supported languages | |||
Uses Mac OS X 10.5+ grammar checker for supported languages | |||
Support for magnify and swipe gestures on multi-touch trackpads | |||
Support for using an Apple Remote when displaying presentations | |||
Media (audio and video) support | |||
Media browser, providing easy access to iLife images, sounds, and video | ** | ||
Image Capture support, for inserting images directly from scanners and digital cameras | |||
Reads and writes files on AFP and SMB volumes and iDisks | Partial** | ||
Native (styled) copy and paste support | |||
Drag-and-drop between other applications | |||
Support for Mac OS X Services | |||
AppleScript support | |||
Integrated with Finder and major mail clients | |||
Usable with accessibility tools such as iListen, Proloquo, ViaVoice, and others | (?) | ||
Support for the Mac OS X accessibility framework | (?) | ||
Reads from the Mac OS X Address Book as a datasource | |||
Reads from the Thunderbird Address Book as a datasource | |||
Notes | |||
* NeoOffice includes the NeoLight Spotlight Importer and the NeoPeek Quick Look importer; LibreOffice also includes a Spotlight importer. On Mac OS X 10.5, Apple includes OpenDocument Text (.odt) files in the file types natively supported by Spotlight and Quick Look. | |||
† Requires the Office for Mac 20011 version 14.2.4 update. | |||
‡ Retail version. | |||
** LibreOffice is missing support for iDisk and webdav volumes and also is missing support for using Base .odb files on any remote volume. |
Feature | NeoOffice 3.3 | Microsoft Office 2011 | LibreOffice 3.6 |
---|---|---|---|
Type ahead word-completion (optional), similar to features found in mobile phones | |||
A logical, safe and suite-wide system for templates, so these are never accidentally updated | |||
Clean HTML code export (compliant with international web standards) | |||
Support for international standard ISO 26300 OpenDocument file formats | |||
Support for Office Open XML formats (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx) produced by Microsoft Office 2007 and greater | * | * | * |
Unified User Interface, reducing learning time and costs | |||
Optimized PDF generation | |||
EPS preview, printing, and PDF export | (?) | † | |
Smoother text kerning | ‡ | N/A | |
Online document sharing service | ** | ** | |
UI for choosing which component appears on launch | N/A | ||
Notes | |||
* NeoOffice and LibreOffice include support for reading and writing Word 2007 (.docx), Excel 2007 (.xlsx), and PowerPoint 2007 (.pptx) files using code from the ooo-build project. Office 2011 includes native support for reading and writing OpenXML file formats. | |||
† LibreOffice 3.6 does not support embedding EPS files in PDF files created when using the Export as PDF function. | |||
‡ NeoOffice 3.0.2 and later include text kerning improvements that result in a smoother, more uniform appearance compared to text positioning in LibreOffice. | |||
** NeoOffice Mobile allows users to securely share NeoOffice files with other users and other computers, publish directly from within NeoOffice, and view published documents using secure connections from regular web browsers or web-enabled mobile devices (including native iOS and Android NeoOffice Mobile apps), or from NeoOffice itself. Both free and paid accounts are available; see the NeoOffice Mobile site for more information. Paid NeoOffice Mobile accounts also allow NeoOffice to open and save files from Google Docs. Microsoft's Office 365 is a paid, business-oriented suite of online office applications as well as web-based file storage that is compatible with Office 2011. Microsoft's SkyDrive is a web-based file storage service that appears to integrate with Office 2011 via a separate application and web browser plug-ins. |
Feature | NeoOffice 3.3 | Microsoft Office 2011 | LibreOffice 3.6 |
---|---|---|---|
Localized user interface and help files (number of languages) | 34* | 14* | 109* |
International spelling checkers | 88† | 17† | 88† |
Support for text entry in non-Roman scripts, including South Asian, East Asian, right-to-left and complex text layout scripts | Some [1] | ||
Supported scripts or languages: | |||
Arabic | ‡ | ||
Armenian | |||
Cyrillic | |||
Cherokee | |||
Chinese (Simplified) | |||
Chinese (Traditional) | |||
Devanagari & Gujarati (Indic languages) | |||
Greek | |||
Hebrew | |||
Inuktitut | |||
Japanese | |||
Korean | |||
Roman (Western and Eastern European languages) | |||
Roman (Hawaiian, Northern Sami) | |||
Roman (Vietnamese) | |||
Tamil | Partial[2] | ||
Thai | |||
Other | Likely** | Unknown | Likely** |
Notes | |||
* NeoOffice ships with UIs for US English, French, German, and Italian; UIs for the other 30 languages are freely available in language packs. Office 2011 is available in Chinese, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Polish, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish [3]. LibreOffice 3.6 is officially available in US English for Intel or PowerPC Macs, with 108 other languages available as language packs. | |||
† NeoOffice uses the native Mac OS X spell-checker by default. If there is no native spell-checker dictionary available for a language, NeoOffice will fall back to Hunspell dictionaries. An ever-growing number of writing (proofing) tools for many languages are available from the OpenOffice.org project [4]. Microsoft Office 2011 ships with proofing tools for Catalan, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English (US/UK/AU/CA), Finnish, French (FR/CA), German (DE/AT/CH), Italian, Japanese, Norwegian (NB/NN), Polish, Portugese (PT/BR), Russian, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish [5]. | |||
‡ LibreOffice requires manual selection of an appropriate Arabic script font in order to correctly display Arabic text. | |||
** Because the core OpenOffice.org code includes support for languages and scripts which do not have keyboard layouts in Mac OS X, and because Mac OS X includes system-level Unicode support for many of these languages even though Apple does not ship fonts or keyboards, it is very likely that NeoOffice and LibreOffice will support text entry (and perhaps sorting) in the language/script if one installs third-party Unicode fonts and keyboard layouts. See Tom Gewecke's Your Multilingual Mac for more resources. For instance, there is a report that NeoOffice handles Khmer very well, and there has even been a report of using NeoOffice with characters in Unicode Planes 1 and 2. |
Feature | NeoOffice 3.3 Writer | Microsoft Office Word 2011 | LibreOffice 3.6 Writer |
---|---|---|---|
A logical style system that does not invent styles based on your layout choices | |||
Functional bullet/list numbering | |||
The ability to import WordPerfect documents | * | * | |
The ability to import Microsoft Works word processing documents | † | † | |
Table drawing options | Good | Very good | Good |
Notes | |||
* Thanks to the libwpd project. | |||
† Experimental support; not all versions of the format are supported and some formatting may be lost. Thanks to the libwps and ooo-build projects. |
Feature | NeoOffice 3.3 Calc | Microsoft Office Excel 2011 | LibreOffice 3.6 Calc |
---|---|---|---|
More conditional layout options for cells | |||
Style-enabled layout system for text and cells | |||
Support for linear programming extensions for spreadsheets | * | † | * |
Support for Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) macros | ‡ | ‡ | |
Notes | |||
* Thanks to the ooo-build project. | |||
† Microsoft announced in August 2011 that the Solver is available again as a stand-alone application that is downloadable for free by Excel 12.1.2 users. | |||
‡ Experimental support; all macros may not work perfectly. Thanks to the ooo-build project. |
Feature | NeoOffice 3.3 Impress | Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2011 | LibreOffice 3.6 Impress |
---|---|---|---|
The ability to export to Flash animation | |||
Superior (3D) font art possibilities. | |||
Support for playing QuickTime-supported audio and video | |||
Notes |