NeoOffice 2.1, a FREE Alternative to Microsoft Office 2008?

Following last week's From the Dark Side commentary on the planned lameness of Microsoft's Office 2008 (late 2007 without VBA support), reader Warren Klink pointed us to an additional alternative, NeoOffice 2.1, which he says works very well on a Mac.

NeoOffice 2.1, based on OpenOffice 2.1, was released in late March and it contains a number of unique features including:

• Opening, editing, and saving of Microsoft Office 2007 OpenXML documents
  
• Execution of Visual Basic for Applications macros in Excel documents
  
• Support for linear programming extensions for spreadsheets
  

So, the NeoOffice 2.1 release allows Mac users to utilize OpenXML documents prior to the announced availability of translators from Microsoft. With Microsoft's announced intention to remove VBA support in Microsoft Office Mac 2007, NeoOffice 2.1 will be one of the only available ongoing solutions for Mac users who use VBA macros in their Excel documents.

According to NeoOffice.org, support for interoperability with Microsoft Office 2007 OpenXML formatted documents and Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) is drawn from the ooo-build project, a branch of OpenOffice.org that includes several features which Sun has not yet integrated up-stream. ooo-build is a collaboration between many individuals & vendors spearheaded by Novell. Leveraging the ongoing contributions from ooo-build, NeoOffice.org states that NeoOffice 2.1 is the most compatible office productivity application suite for Mac OS X for today and beyond.

NeoOffice 2.1 is donationware and may be downloaded (139MB but there is also a BitTorrent source) and used for free.

We downloaded and installed NeoOffice 2.1. Then, we downloaded and installed the latest patch, Patch 5. NeoOffice worked fine on several simple Word 2007 .docx files. [Bill Fox]