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Mac productivity suites: Head to head

Mac office suites, evaluated from the perspective of a teacher
By Christopher Dawson, Contributor
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By Christopher Dawson

View this screenshot gallery of Mac office suites, evaluated from the perspective of a teacher.

NeoOffice is the OS X port of OpenOffice
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The default document template for NeoOffice

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Notice the X11 windowing for OpenOffice

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The default word processing template for Apple's office suite

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The gold standard?

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This command prompt might be a bit disconcerting for average users

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Fortunately, it goes away eventually and OpenOffice launches

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Or not...this was a cut and paste of a fairly simple numbered list with some graphics from NeoOffice in OpenOffice.

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Not the prettiest dialog box ever, but NeoOffice proves to be highly functional.

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Apple's spreadsheet application has a great interface and highlights relevant information in multiple colors for easy modification on the fly.

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The chart ribbon gives you easy access to different chart types.

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This was easy and it looks great; however, the formatting palette incorporates so many functions that it can be overwhelming.

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These actually aren't as easy to create, nor are they as easy to make pretty; this gets the job done, though.

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Again, it gets the job done.

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The ribbons are better executed here than in Office 2007.

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But the confusing palettes remain.

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There's more where these came from. You have to give Apple some credit.

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Again, there's something to be said for the Apple ecosystem.

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