All of us use an office product of some sort on a regular basis. Whether you use an application to write documents or a spreadsheet to calculate formulas. Most everyone migrates to the very popular Microsoft Office products and pay for it through the nose when this whole time two completely free options exist to us. OpenOffice and NeoOffice are two absolutely free office products that do just as good, if not better, then Microsoft Office does.

I was one of those that went and bought Microsoft Office for my Mac and thought I had to use it but after dealing with Excel crashing ALL THE TIME I looked for fixes and none exist. So I looked at NeoOffice (which opens and saves in Excel format) and have been using it for awhile now and forget its not Excel (except for the fact it doesn't crash).

I highly recommend the product and if you try it (you have nothing to loose) you'll probably find that you like it as well.

I also have NeoOffice open and really love it. Easy to use and I can't believe it is free. I wish I would have donated the money to the NeoOffice team versus wasting it on Microsoft Office.

Anyway to make .xls and .doc files open in NeoOffice instead of Microsoft Office?

Sorry about that... I was a little vague. Take for example your typical .doc word document. Navigate to that document in the finder and right click on it.

From the contextual menu choose Get Info. A window will pop up with assorted info about your file

About half way down you'll see a disclosure triangle next to open with. Choose open with Neo Office.

Just below that you should see a button that says change all. This will make all .doc files open with the app you choose.

You'll need to do this with other file types you want Neo to open as well. Like .txt or .ppt for example.

Now I am using leopard... so let me know if your not seeing it in Tiger if thats what your using.