[Richard Kimball]

Appleworks is about the equivalent of the old Microsoft Works. NeoOffice is okay, but I use Microsoft Office X. I don't care for Windows, but MS really does make the best office suite. I tried the 30 day trial of pages, and it was pretty lame. I bought the educational version of Office, and it's got Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Everything exports seamlessly with the Windows version, and the interface is actually better than the Windows version (I have to use it at work). I don't use Entourage, as I find the Apple mail program does everything I need.

For basic stuff, you can get away with Appleworks or NeoOffice. MS Office is by far the best, though.

[6SJ7]

Ditto on post #2. If you can get the educational price on Office, it is worth it for compatibility with all the Windows folk. Entourage was too much for my purposes. The native Mail.app worked just fine.

I find less and less need for using Word. For me, most communication is now via email. If I were writing a book or a proposal, Word would be the way to go.

[daviddennis]

I'm curious - what was lame about pages?

I bought iWork and use Pages for my word processing needs. I like being able to set up styles in a way that's a lot cleaner than how Word does it. It's easy and fun with Pages.

I suppose if you think of it as nothing but a bunch of templates, you might be disappointed. I just start from a blank page and format it from there. I have a master set of styles that I import from another document and I'm good to go.

I will admit that it needs a fair amount of processor power, but other than that I prefer it to Word.

I'm really looking forward to seeing Numbers, or whatever they call their spreadsheet. I have Office X (albiet an old version) and it works fine but I really prefer Apple's software.

D