Apr

3

NeoOffice 2.2.3 Disappointing on Leopard

Filed Under Computers & Tech on April 3, 2008 | 1 Comment

NeoOffice has been around for ages and I keep expecting and wanting it to get better to the point where I don’t feel an urge to buy iWork or, heavens forbid, MS Office. I installed it on my work machine yesterday and I’m sorry to report they’re a LONG way off yet. Firstly, it does not play nice with Spaces so it’s simply not Leopard ready. Poor show at this stage of the game. Secondly, the spell checker is broken, AGAIN. I had problems with this during the very early days of NeoOffice and then they got it fixed but now it’s bust again. What good is a word-processor that can’t spell-check? It’s possible that the spell checking problem is showing up because my computer is configured to use British English rather than American English but that’s not a valid excuse.

NeoOffice is still sluggish, un-polished and buggy. I’m sorry to have to report that but it’s the truth. The sooner the native OS X port of OpenOffice comes out the better.

[tags]OS X, Leopard, OS X 10.5, OpenOffice, NeoOffice[/tags]

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Sep

16

Writing Presentations With Keynote ’08

Filed Under Computers & Tech on September 16, 2007 | 12 Comments

I have been an iLife user for years but hadn’t previously bought iWork because it was lacking a spreadsheet program. When iWork ’08 came out with Numbers I decided the time was right to give it a go. Just to put things into perspective, at work I use Microsoft Office (the Mac version), and at home I’ve been using OpenOffice and NeoOffice. OpenOffice and NeoOffice always strike me a striving to emulate MS Office, iWork doesn’t do this. It sets out to do Presentations, Documents and Spreadsheets in a simple and accessible way. It’s refreshing to use an office package with a simple interface instead of the usual glut of buttons everywhere. I’ll be writing about Pages and Numbers in the future but today I want to talk about the oldest of the iWork applications, the presentation app Keynote. This review is based on my experiences creating and then presenting a talk about science to students at my old secondary school the week before last. You can read about how I got on here see a PDF of my slides here.

[tags]Apple, iWork, KeyNote[/tags]

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