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For basic stuff, you can get away with Appleworks or NeoOffice. MS Office is by far the best, though.
I use AppleWorks (have since it was ClarisWorks 1.0.3) and Keynote.
Ditto to post 2
Unfamiliar with Apple, but I'm using Windows XP, and I've got Open Office 2.0.
Ping!!!
iWork '06 should be announced in early January, and may include a spreadsheet application.
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TextEdit for my quick stuff and in Mac OS X 10.4 it even saves in MS Word format.
Microsoft Office for things that need special formatting and foot notes.
NeoOffice is slow on older machines. I wasn't impressed with its performance on a dual 2Ghz G4, or on a dual G5. Definitely faster than on the single processor machines, but still sluggish.
OpenOffice isn't bad, if you don't mind feeling as if you're using a fully functional windows hack of Microsoft Office.
Microsoft Office is still the king of office applications for the Mac. It is snappy and responsive, fully functional, with all the features most people could possibly need.
(I do believe Apple has an MS Office killer in the bowels of their R&D department at Cupertino. All the signs are there, and it is a complete package with the backend/network features that make MS Office so popular in Windows enterprise environments.)
I use MS Office for OSX - great product.
Back when I was still using Windows, I paid $340 for Windows Word for Office. I hated it with a passion.
I could never get numbers to line up in a simple column. Oh, I'd get the column ok, but here and there numbers would be too far to the left or the right. I longed for a (gasp) typewriter.
Now, I can line them up just fine with AppleWorks 6, but it doesn't show which line you're on from the top. For casual correspondence, that's all right, but often the presentation of the page is important. In my opinion, that's a big mistake by Apple.
I use MS Office (actually Office 2003 I think, I haven't upgraded to 2004.) I have iWork, and played around with that a little bit, but it wasn't really compelling enough for me to switch from Office.
1 posted on 12/31/2005 11:29:20 PM MST by goldstategop
After I bought my 17" PowerBook 2 1/2 years ago,
I still used Office on my PC for work related projects.
Then I bought Student & Teacher Office X,
It was great. Later I was interested in VPC
for the last two applications for which there were no Mac versions.
I found I could buy the Upgrade version of MS Office 2004 w/ VPC
and upgrade the Student & Teacher Word.
VPC is a great product but the XP Pro inside the VPC still has issues.
In my work I need maximum portability with the office,
Office 2004 for the Mac was great!
At a job assignment I was using very complicated Office templates,
using the PC version was very difficult.
I brought the work home and loaded it on the Mac and it was a dream.
The aids for managing templates was the most user-friendly,
I have ever encountered. The PC version was user hostile.
I bought iWork, it is OK for newsletters,
but it did not displace Office for the Mac.
Microsoft Office
I hate to use it but "It just works"
I was using Appleworks, but my job requires compatibility with MS Office (yes, I know $FREE_OFFICE_SUITE is also compatible with MS files...). I actually like the Office 2004 suite for Mac. Much better than similar Windows version.
I haven't really tried Pages or Keynote, but maybe in a few years after upgrading to a MacIntel.
