I usually give OSX users a copy of LibreOffice if they ask for something that can open all of the Word/Excel files that people send them (which is their primary use case :-). Speaking more generally, I think that LibreOffice provides one of the best FLOSS 'office suite' tools, and has a solid community of both paid contributors and volunteers.
One issue I've had with NeoOffice is that I couldn't find an open/free support forum. In the past few months I've tried to help out a handful of people who were having problems with NeoOffice, but because you must have a paid support contract to use the official NeoOffice forums (and because I don't regularly use OSX), I saw no reason for me to pay them $100 a year just so that I could help triage someone else's problem.
There's a comparison of NeoOffice, OpenOffice.org, and LibreOffice on the NeoOffice site, however it hasn't been updated in 6 months and probably isn't including all of the features that LibreOffice has added since then: http://neowiki.neooffice.org/index.php/NeoOffice_Feature_Comparison
In terms of releases, the latest stable release of LO was 5 days ago, while the latest stable release of NeoOffice was over 5 months ago. I believe that LibreOffice has a number of new features and feature-improvements that are not present in NeoOffice.
If I were using a Mac, I'd use LibreOffice.
In any case, good luck with whatever software you choose!
As a daily Mac user, I agree. NeoOffice lacks many of the invaluable recent developments of both OpenOffice and LibreOffice. The only advantage with NeoOffice is better Cocoa integration, but it would be much better if OpenOffice and LibreOffice both became native Cocoa apps (might happen soon!)
CyanCG ( 2013-02-05 04:51:50 +0200 )editAccording to NeoOffice website, NeoOffice still includes some features LibreOffice doesn't.
While OpenOffice and LibreOffice now have their own Mac OS X versions, Patrick and Ed continually add improvements to NeoOffice that our Mac OS X users will not find in OpenOffice or LibreOffice ...
But I guess that's also true in the opposite way: I don't think NeoOffice devs backport all new development in LibreOffice, and being LibreOffice's community bigger than NeoOffice one, I guess it will improve Mac OSX support faster than NeoOffice will implement all new features.
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Asked: 2012-08-19 18:25:53 +0200
Seen: 800 times
Last updated: Feb 04
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