7 November 2006
Back to NeoOffice
When I got my PowerBook nearly two years ago I started using NeoOffice for office documents. It is a Mac-specific port of OpenOffice.org and was a bit slow on the PB, but usable. I don’t use office apps very much at home and it was perfectly adequate for my needs.
After upgrading to the MacBook Pro I had to ditch NeoOffice because it didn’t work on Intel-powered Macs. It was also based on OOo version 1.x so it was a bit out of date. I switched to the OOo version 2 release that uses Mac’s X11.
OOo worked fine (but not very Mac-like) until last week, when it broke: it wouldn’t even start. The killer was probably Apple’s X11 update which I automatically installed (as you do…). Installing a new version of OOo and deleting OOo pref files did not fix things.
I couldn’t be bothered trawling the Net for solutions, reverting X11, etc. (the usual geeky fix-it-yourself stuff) so I took another look at NeoOffice. Lo and behold! the NeoOffice team had updated it to be based on OOo 2.x and to work on Intel Macs. A double bonus.
It is in beta but has worked fine for me so far. I can use the Command key again (As God Intended™). I have even donated money to support NeoOffice development.
