Open Office for Mac

[craig1]

Do they? Oooh, didn't know that, thought the Mac apps were excluded. Will take a look at that.

They only have Office 2011 and old copies of Virtual PC for Mac on there at this time but I was told that they'll be including all new Mac releases on Technet from now on.

[Durbs]

Especially as last year they started including their Mac range in the product list.

Do they? Oooh, didn't know that, thought the Mac apps were excluded. Will take a look at that.

[craig1]

I used it for quite a while on my Mac Mini but ended up splashing out in the end for Office 2011 Home & Student (which allows me to install it on 3 Macs).

Why? OO was 'fine', cant think of anything bad to say about it really but it just 'wasn't Office'. They've done a real nice job on 2011 for the Mac so I just personally found it a lot nicer to use than OO and i'm a lot less likely to run into any compatibility issues when sharing docs (had a few with OO, nothing major though as i'm not a heavy Office user, just some layouts of docs sent by other people going to cock).

One thing i messed up on though is buying the cheap Home & Student edition. I got that then realised that I really should have got the version with Outlook in it as am not a fan of any of the Mac email clients. I'd assumed there would be an upgrade route where I could add-on Outlook, or buy it standalone, but no, i'd have to buy a new copy of 2011 Home & Business. So if you're getting it, i'd recommend getting the Business edition straight off. Not tried it, but reading around, looks like Outlook 2011 Mac is decent.

Plus, if you are using Lion, MS are apparently working on an update to 2011 to add integration with Lion's auto save, versioning and full screen mode.

Technet subscriptions are your friend with Microsoft products. Especially as last year they started including their Mac range in the product list.

MS Office for Mac 2011 is probably MS's 2nd best app/suite release ever (after Live Mesh) and I've had absolutely no problems. Compare that to the continuing headaches I have with Office 2010 for PCs...

[Durbs]

I used it for quite a while on my Mac Mini but ended up splashing out in the end for Office 2011 Home & Student (which allows me to install it on 3 Macs).

Why? OO was 'fine', cant think of anything bad to say about it really but it just 'wasn't Office'. They've done a real nice job on 2011 for the Mac so I just personally found it a lot nicer to use than OO and i'm a lot less likely to run into any compatibility issues when sharing docs (had a few with OO, nothing major though as i'm not a heavy Office user, just some layouts of docs sent by other people going to cock).

One thing i messed up on though is buying the cheap Home & Student edition. I got that then realised that I really should have got the version with Outlook in it as am not a fan of any of the Mac email clients. I'd assumed there would be an upgrade route where I could add-on Outlook, or buy it standalone, but no, i'd have to buy a new copy of 2011 Home & Business. So if you're getting it, i'd recommend getting the Business edition straight off. Not tried it, but reading around, looks like Outlook 2011 Mac is decent.

Plus, if you are using Lion, MS are apparently working on an update to 2011 to add integration with Lion's auto save, versioning and full screen mode.

[Sysman]

I'm not sure of OO's current status and on my Windows system I've been running Libre Office. One advantage that brought was spreadsheets with more than 65K lines.

Oracle recently donated OO to Apache, so maybe the Libre Office flavour will disappear.

I've managed quite well so far using a combination of iWork and NeoOffice/OO on my Mac for several years, and Libre Office on my PC since early this year. Having said that I rarely write stuff to distribute to others using these packages so haven't really been exposed to compatibility issues. Now that world plus dog has PDF reading capability, compatibility isn't the issue it used to be anyway.

[SimonMac]

I used OO when I moved to the Mac, but as most of the stuff I do is from Word, with all the word formatting it just didn't work. I down loaded the 30 day trial of Office 2011 and I think I am going with that

[DaveB]

So, since the PowerPC version of MS Office is no longer supported in Lion my copy of Office 2004 no longer works. Rather than shell out on the latest version I was going to give OO a try. Anyone got any experience of the current version?