Hardware

Mac productivity suites: Head to head

By // March 3, 2008, 12:10 AM PST

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  • NeoOffice splash screen

    By Christopher Dawson

    View this screenshot gallery of Mac office suites, evaluated from the perspective of a teacher.

    NeoOffice is the OS X port of OpenOffice

  • NeoOffice Writer

    The default document template for NeoOffice

  • OpenOffice Writer

    Notice the X11 windowing for OpenOffice

  • Apple Pages

    The default word processing template for Apple's office suite

  • Microsoft Word 2008

    The gold standard?

  • X11 needed some time to think

    This command prompt might be a bit disconcerting for average users

  • That's better

    Fortunately, it goes away eventually and OpenOffice launches

  • Formatting and images copied into OpenOffice

    Or not...this was a cut and paste of a fairly simple numbered list with some graphics from NeoOffice in OpenOffice.

  • Formatting pictures

    Not the prettiest dialog box ever, but NeoOffice proves to be highly functional.

  • Charts in Apple Numbers

    Apple's spreadsheet application has a great interface and highlights relevant information in multiple colors for easy modification on the fly.

  • Making charts in Office 2008

    The chart ribbon gives you easy access to different chart types.

  • A pie chart in Excel

    This was easy and it looks great; however, the formatting palette incorporates so many functions that it can be overwhelming.

  • Charts in NeoOffice

    These actually aren't as easy to create, nor are they as easy to make pretty; this gets the job done, though.

  • Charts in OpenOffice

    Again, it gets the job done.

  • PowerPoint 2008

    The ribbons are better executed here than in Office 2007.

  • Formatting palette

    But the confusing palettes remain.

  • Themes in Keynote

    There's more where these came from. You have to give Apple some credit.

  • Inserting media into Keynote

    Again, there's something to be said for the Apple ecosystem.

NeoOffice splash screen

By Christopher Dawson

View this screenshot gallery of Mac office suites, evaluated from the perspective of a teacher.

NeoOffice is the OS X port of OpenOffice

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