Note also that I'm going to compare NeoOffice to Microsoft Office because that's how most people will view and use the program. MS Office has become the standard by which office applications are judged (for better or worse) and so when I use iWork or any other Word Processor/Presentation or Spreadsheet software, Office is my reference point. That being said, it's somewhat unfair to compare NeoOffice to MS Office because Microsoft is a giant corporate monolith backed by billions of dollars and open source is a bunch of folks like me and you plugging away at home, after hours, funded by the donations of, well, folks like you and me.

The installer leaves you with a single application on your Mac that launches on double-click like you're used to. From the NeoOffice interface you can create and open Word Processing, Spreadsheet, Presentation, Drawing, and Formula documents. Menu choices are also available for creating HTML and Master documents, Business Cards, and Labels. NeoOffice is a pretty comprehensive solution and really does most of the major tasks people ask MS Office to do (save Email and Calendar/Contacts, which are handled by Apple's Mail, iCal, and Address Book applications).

Let me say this right off the bat: NeoOffice is stable, or at least it has been for me. No crashes yet. Not a one. Good work, developers (Patrick Luby and Edward Peterlin are listed as the creators of the project).

The first thing you'll notice about NeoOffice is that startup is slow and rather than popping up all at once like most applications, the elements of any new window appear a few at a time, right before your eyes, until the window is fully composed and ready for use. This was my experience using v 1.2 on both my iBook G4/1Ghz and iMac G5/1.6Ghz machines. The second thing you'll notice about NeoOffice is the user interface. Unless you're brand new to using an OS X Mac, you'll probably be tempted to laugh at the somewhat crude, dated layout and graphical elements that appear on your screen.

Remember, it is Open Source
This is where you have to take into account what OpenOffice, NeoOffice, and open source software in general are all about. The idea is to create working, useable alternatives to commercial software and to do so in a collaborative manner. Generally this results in software licensed for free personal use by most anyone who wants it. Generally this is also the result of many people working for free, in their spare time, without the budget, technical resources, and other support afforded by the backing of a major software corporation. In other words, NeoOffice ain't supposed to be MS Office, and it ain't gonna be. What it is, to borrow a cliche, is software by the people for the people. It works, but it's a little bit ugly, a little bit slow, and a little bit rough around the edges.

Most of my daily work on the computer that I'd use MS Office for involves word processing. Once in awhile I'll create or view a PowerPoint presentation (usually when using one in a project with students). Rarely do I use any drawing tools in Office, nor do I create HTML pages using Word. So my testing of NeoOffice followed those general patterns, though I did make sure to try out every type of document for the sake of the review.

In general, I'll say this about NeoOffice 1.2: It's an excellent start. I wouldn't call myself a Power Office User by any stretch of the imagination, so I could probably jettison Word and Excel in favor of NeoOffice right now and not run into any situations I couldn't handle anytime soon. I'm not going to do that, however, because I already have a licensed copy of Office and while it takes up too much hard disk space and tends to annoy me here and there, it's still a faster, smoother ride than NeoOffice ... by a long shot.

Most functions and commands I'm used to working with in MS Office can be found in NeoOffice, though they sometimes show up in unexpected places. Note I didn't say that everything you're used to can be found: It can't. Toolbars are not dockable and floating palletes are much fewer, further between, and rougher here. Integration with the Finder and Mail apps is solid, if somewhat crude looking.

Templates? Well, NeoOffice 1.2 comes with four presentation templates pre-instaled. They're fine. MS Word comes with a bunch more than that and a ton are available online. A big key to the future of a program like NeoOffice is, of course, the contributions of users to the development of the application. One thing people can do is create some killer templates and share them on the Web. If you think about it, half the reason why Apple programs like iWork, Keynote, and iDVD are popular are because they come with a bunch of very slick templates right out of the box. A few good ones for NeoOffice's word processing and presentation modules would be a great start.

On the plus side, though, the font menus show available fonts as they'll render and not just as a list of names. I love programs that do that. Why don't all programs do that already? It is the 21st Century, is it not?

Patience is a Virtue
Working in NeoOffice is an exercise in patience. Everytime I scroll within a window, that window disappers and redraws itself. As such, scrolls through multipage documents are akin to watching a sort of ASCII strobe light blink very slowly. Scrolling itself is a bit wonky, especially when I use the wheel on my mouse or Sidetrack's scrolling trackpad functionality. Clicking menu and toolbar items often results in a lag long enough to make me click again once or twice, resulting in the dreaded "all your clicks come back to haunt you" syndrome: after a few seconds of nothing the program responds to all of my clicks in rapid succession, usually leaving me right back where I started. Working with complicated formulas in the Spreadsheet module is very, very slow. I don't have to do this often so I only ran a few tests. That was enough for me. If your work depends on formulas and calculations in spreadsheets, stick with Excel for now.

These symptoms tend to be exacerbated by switching back and forth between NeoOffice and another open program. For example, I often hop between copying text from Safari/Firefox and pasting it into my text editor when writing articles or creating Web-based lesson plans for school. Doing so with NeoOffice as my text editor means waiting a few beats before I can paste. This is either annoying or unacceptable, depending on my mood and working pace. In an office situation this would be completely intolerable.

Overall Impressions and Rating
I'm not going to delve further into specifics of what NeoOffice can and can't do for one simple reason: If you're the kind of person who's going to download, install, and actually give an open source office suite a chance, you're also likely the kind of person who knows it's not going to do everything MS Office or iWork can do. If you're interested in specific functionality, check out the NeoOffice home page, NeoWiki, Trinity Forums, or the NeoOffice entry on VersionTracker, or drop me a line and I'll see if I can answer your question.

Assigning a rating to a program like NeoOffice is hard. The application gets five 'Books for its mere existence and stability. Seriously. As one VersionTracker user review put it, "The other positive thing that the whole OpenOffice suite is doing is innovating. They are getting past the "must copy MS features", and are doing a good job at incorporating their own solutions. One day, those unique solutions will be driving their market." Can't stress that enough: a free or low-cost office suite built by Mac users for Mac users around existing file standards would be a wonderful thing, and should NeoOffice continue to evolve in the areas of speed and GUI refinements, it will be a wonderful thing someday soon.

However, my fuzzy feelings about free and open source software aside, NeoOffice probably deserves one and a half or two 'Books at most for its performance and features. It's slow, it looks dated, and it's quirky in a way that quickly becomes annoying and gets in the way of your work.

So I'm giving it a three and a half out of five. And unlike commercial products, I'm figuring intent and potential heavily into the equation with this rating. It's a good start -- a great start, really when you think about it. I mean, it's a free office suite that actually works, actually handles .doc and .xls files the majority of the time, and it's potential is as vast as all of the people interested in contributing to it's development.

Will I deploy it across my school's network? No. Will I delete my copy of MS Office and use NeoOffice exclusively for my own work? No. But will I keep using it, recommend it to friends as an example of what open source communities are all about, and keep an eager eye out for future releases? You bet. NeoOffice is exciting, even if more in theory than practice just yet.