Are there any reasons to use NeoOffice instead of LibreOffice (on a Mac)?
Thanks.
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!)
That feature comparison page is based on 3.6 and I was unable to create an account to update it. This ticket seems to be the central tracker for all OS X integration bugs and enhancements. Things like CoreText have been implemented, but other still remain. Since LibreOffice doesn’t require copyright assignments, I don’t know how NeoOffice can keep a competitive edge without rebasing on the Apache licensed OpenOffice.
According 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.
Fast forwarding to 2020. Tried Open Office, Libre Office and NeoOffice on Mac. NeoOffice is the best solution for Mac. Open Office’s interface hasn’t updated much. Libre Office lags badly in tables - a bug that hasn’t been solved, though the toolset is good. NeoOffice works fine and am using it now.
Quoting @gyht: “Libre Office lags badly in tables …”
You surely hadn’t added an answer to this >7 y old thread if not you expected it to be of some worth for somebody.
Therefore I wonder for what reason you didn’t add any detail. I’m not even sure if the “lag in tables” you talked about is concerning TextTables or Spreadsheets (also often called tables) or both kinds or a specific table-feature inside spreadsheets.
Considering I was a Mac user trying to find advice with my decision, I wouldn’t know how to evaluate your answer.
Are you ready to argue for your recommendation?