How To Replace Microsoft’s Office For Mac For Free

Tuesday, October 14, 2008 | Mac Reviews | Read or Post a Comment

Office Love it or hate it, one of the most popular software packages for Mac users is Microsoft’s Office for Mac. Mac Office ranges in price from about $150 to nearly $500.

Is there a suitable alternative? Yes. Open Office, popular for many years as an Office substitute on Windows PCs, is now looking great on the Mac, complete with a great price tag. Uh, that’s no price tag, as in free.

The latest version of Open Office is grown up, attractive, fast, loaded with features,.... (excerpted).

6 Reader Comments

Harvey said:

I have a two-column landscape document in DOCX format. OpenOffice.org opened it as a one-column portrait document. No good. NeoOffice.org opened it correctly. OpenOffice lost the borders; NeoOffice had them correctly positioned, but with a spurious background color.

NeoOffice does a better job with DOCX. I’m surprised.

dba said:

There is a way to bring in Access database files. Click Here for the details. It works as advertised.

Open Office 3 is a very good product with many capabilities.

Danny said:

It should be understood that if you need full Microsoft Office compatibility, OpenOffice is not a good choice. too many differences. Some in Excel, some in Word, many in PowerPoint. Commenting and Tracking is best left to MS Office users.

However, from my first two days of using OpenOffice 3, I can say I am impressed. It hasn’t crashed. It opens most Word docs and Excel spreadsheets with few problems, and there is just a lot of power and ability considering the entry level price tag.

If you are a small business and don’t have to worry about documents from other businesses which use MS Office, you can save your business plenty of money by standardizing on OpenOffice.

Bill said:

Can you open a MS Access file in Open Office for OS X?

Dieter said:

But there is a PPC build of OpenOffice 3:
A quick Google search for “OpenOffice 3 Mac OS X PPC” gets you some sites with PPC builds. Most are of release candidate 4 (which is allegedly the same code as the final version), but there are also sites that offer the final build, e.g.
http://www.computerbase.de/downloads/software/bueroprogramme/openofficeorg/

Isn’t open source software great?

Regards Dieter

D said:

Does anyone know how commenting and tracking works between MSOffice Word and Open Office

thx

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