CubaMark

Just FYI, in case you haven't tried the latest: NeoOffice 2.1 was released March 27th, and there is a 2.1 patch also available that may improve performance.

FWIW, I'm find it more than sufficient as a replacement for Word...


M

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reddahc

Thanks for the advice. Perhaps I should have clarified - I do need to do a lot of document sharing with longer documents, as well as more advanced functions like tracking changes, so I'm not sure that the open source alternatives would work for that reason.

It sounds like Office for Mac sounds like the way to go. Parallels is cool, but I'd prefer to not have to open it everytime I needed to open a document.

That said, is there any way to link the toolbars to the document window in Word (am I missing something)? It wouldn't normally be much of an issue, but I have an extra monitor, so I wouldn't want to have to move across to another screen to use the toolbars.

IronMac

I suspect (and I can be totally wrong) that they said that it was too big is that you increased the font size in order to compensate for the small size on-screen.

As I've said, I've asked about this on other forums (including this one?) and at the Apple Store in Eaton Center and it's some sort of weird anomaly with MS.

Thanks CM for the NeoOffice update info. I may try it or just get rid of the suite since Office does everything that I need to do. Hey, I've already paid for it so why not?

mguertin

For the font sizes, as I said before, it is specific to that font, Times New Roman. Try using something in the Arial family.

Demosthenes X

I'm not that stupid. Word clearly recognizes it as 12pt, double spaced. But it sure doesn't print that way.

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Carl

I guess it does run through Rosetta, but I can't say that makes much difference. I find Word scrolls too fast anyway. Office doesn't have to do much, and I have never heard anyone complain about Office being slow. What needs to be fast?
I run it on an iMac 24, 2.16 Ghz w 2 G of RAM. It is twice as fast as Office 2007 on my 3 Ghz PC running XP SP2 when it comes to scrolling through a document.

I use Parallels for Solidworks and AutoCAD sometimes and that is 3D assembly. I have opened up objects with over 50,000 parts in under a five seconds. Redraws are faster than my PC running native. Gaming is bad, but CAD seems OK. Office runs fine under Parallels.

I think people keep making the mistake of confusing emulation with the Intel Macs and then think there is some sort of penalty while we wait for the computer to convert from one OS to the other. I'm no expert on the deep mechanics of it, but I can tell you that I haven't found anything doesn't run the same or faster on my Intel Mac.
The only thing that seems to require BootCamp for me are games, but I have a PC for that stuff.

Come to think of it, I really can't complain about Photoshop CS2 on my Intel Mac, that runs under Rosetta and probably needs a bit more horsepower than Office does. I don't think you will be bothered by speed issues, and as for compatibility, I email my docs to PC's without any trouble. That problem went away years ago.

Demosthenes X

The speed "problem" with Parallels is not because of translation, but merely the machine running two operating systems at once. I say "problem" because it is happily solved by a simple RAM increase. Although I am (pleasantly) surprised to learn that Windows on a Mac performs better than Windows on a PC.

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IronMac

I didn't mean it that way but some people were telling me to compensate by increasing the size and then change it back when I print.

Demosthenes X

No harm. It's much more convenient just to go up to View and zoom in.

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