NeoOffice 3.0

NeoOffice is a very nice open-source productivity suite. It includes apps to work on text documents, spreadsheets, databases, presentations, and drawings.

At only 166 megabytes, this suite is both light and full-featured. I personally like the fact that you can access all of the features from a single window, just like OpenOffice. So you can stop working on a document and switch to a spreadsheet really quickly.

Looks-wise, NeoOffice looks a lot like both MS Office and OpenOffice, but you can't really complain, since there isn't much that can be invented to change the genre. The interface is clean and intuitive. Most features that you would expect from your productivity suite are there, minus a few important ones. The one that I would miss the most is support for what Office calls "track changes", which is a collaborative feature, if you will. The application tries to make up for that with other features like cross-referencing and, well, even a media player, which almost plays XVID files.

There is support for very basic drawings in most of the applications on this suite and, as you would expect, the spreadsheet app has several functions that you can add to your sheet.

Speed-wise, I like how fast NeoOffice loads and how fast you can switch between plenty of apps in the suite. One thing that I don't like, but it is not a big deal, is that you have to download "patches" to upgrade the app. There doesn't seem to be an automatic updater.