6 Best Microsoft Office Alternatives for Mac OS X
You might want variety. You might want to avoid the bloatware associated with MS Office. You might not want to pay for licensing on the Microsoft Office suite. Whatever the reason, you need to have a compatible office suite for document and spreadsheet creation. Here are six great MS Office alternatives for the Mac.
1. Mariner Write and Calc [$79.95]
The developers at Mariner Software are interested in helping writers be at their most productive. Mariner Write and Calc are no different, providing the necessary features of office productivity suites. You can easily access MS Word and Excel files. You can also save your programs in compatible formats. Write allows you to design bibliographies, footnotes, and endnotes. You can import and insert graphics and have the functions for which you are looking. In the Calc program, you can perform over 150 spreadsheet functions and save your documents as CSV files. There is multi-language and technical support available.
2. Open Office [Free]
More businesses are turning to Open Office because it is an open-source set of applications which perform the same tasks as the MS Office suite. You can do nearly everything with Open Office, including design presentations, write papers, and graph your progress. You will receive free software support through the global Open Office communities. If you have documents created by other office programs, Open Office will probably read them. The program is supported in many languages. This suite has been developed over the course of 20 years, and has become the leading open-source MS Office alternatives.
3. iWork Suite [$79]
This set of applications comes standard with every new Mac. The iWork suite consists of Pages (word processing), Keynote (presentation), and Numbers (spreadsheet), offering you the essential tasks of a productivity suite. You can create dynamic bibliographies, spreadsheets from which you can easily create graphs, and dramatic presentations with the iWork suite. Export your documents in Pages, Word, or PDF formats for editing on the go. Pages makes it simple to create newsletters and other important documents on your Mac. When you choose this productivity suite, you are choosing reliability, efficiency and imagination.
4. NeoOffice 3.1.1 [Free]
The creators of NeoOffice took the source code of OpenOffice and tailored it to the Macintosh user. Because it has been honed to the needs of Mac users, it runs faster than both OpenOffice and MS Office. These programs are designed to feel more Mac-friendly and Mac-native. NeoOffice has many of the same features as OpenOffice, including language support and compatibility with nearly every office suite on the market. NeoOffice is compatible with your iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch, so you can easily transport and edit your documents anywhere.
5. Papyrus Office [$99]
Papyrus integrates word processing with a database, so you have most functions available within a single program. You can conduct your word searches phonetically, work on databases simultaneously with other users, and create multi-faceted bibliographies. Large documents do not pose a lagging problem, as the program is more efficient than many MS Office alternatives. The program is small and transportable, you can run Papyrus off of a USB memory stick. With Papyrus, you get a stable set of applications with proper support.
6. IBM Lotus Symphony [Free]
With Lotus Symphony, you can create word-processing documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. With Documents, you can perform inline spell checking, easily insert graphs and export your documents in PDF format. Presentations offers several animation effects and plenty of templates from which to choose. Lotus Symphony Spreadsheets allows you to create amortization tables, perform easy or complicated functions, and share your results in PDF format.
Perform the same functions as the MS Office suite using one of these six applications. There are varying degrees of support available for each program. The open source programs can be used within your business without worries about licensing. Try an MS Office alternative today.
John Brook writes about office supplies for Office Kitten.
Linux’s gedit is way better!
Although Microsoft Office sucks big time, but it’s still the best one for my work compare to the other options. I really hope Apple put a lot of effort for their iWork, so i can make a Switch completely.
I think Open Office is better then other’s
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