Listen to me, I sound like a Mac user already. It’s extra overhead for the laptop and it also breaks out of the traditional Mac experience. Installing X-11 isn’t a huge deal, but I didn’t like the idea of having a layer between me and the applications. X-11 is a Unix based graphical environment. Upon closer inspection though, I learned that in order to run OO on my MacBook, I would need to install X-11 on my Mac first. Since OO can read and write the popular MS Office extensions, it was looking like a perfect fit. With this previous experience in mind, I knew that OpenOffice (OO) could meet my needs from a functionality standpoint. In fact, for about a year, that was the only office suite I used (I had lost my MS Office disks). I’ve played with OpenOffice off-and-on for several years. The good news was that they released the source code to the Open Source Community and thus OpenOffice was born. Sun ended up changing their minds regarding open source an decided to go a different direction a few years back. The office suite was originally put out as an open source solution from Sun called StarOffice. If Microsoft Office is the de facto standard for an office suite, the OpenOffice is the de facto alternative of MS Office. I also took a short peek at what Google had to offer as well. Just what options are out there for the Mac? There may be more, but the ones I looked at were OpenOffice, NeoOffice, iWork and mac: Office. Having already spent a great deal of money on a new laptop, accessories, etc., I wanted to make sure I was making the right choice and not just responding to a knee jerk reaction to buy mac: Office, so I decided to try a few other alternatives out there. The de facto standard for office applications is Microsoft Office and Microsoft has a mac version called mac: Office. Those are the core apps that I use every month in some capacity, so regardless of what I chose had to have those pieces included in the suite. The three main applications I needed in the suite were a word processor, spreadsheet and presentation tool. With my e-mail client chosen and my web browsers chosen, the next item on my list was to find a good office suite.
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