[OT] Mac Office Software

[Dave Cross]

I've recently bought a new Mac Book for my wife[1] and it came without  
any Office software installed. Well, we got a 30 day evaluation copy  
of MS Office.

My first instinct was to install OpenOffice, but the Mac version  
doesn't look anywhere near as polished as the Windows and Linux  
versions. It's just a port of the Unix version and therefore I needed  
to install the Mac X Server first (why isn't that part of the standard  
OSX installation?) and even then it looked a bit clunky - it opens an  
xterm as it starts the X Server and (for reasons that I couldn't work  
out) all the menus were in French. So I uninstalled it pretty quickly.

So what do other people use on their Macs? Is there a decent free (or  
even cheap) office suite for the Mac? Or do I just have to bite the  
bullet and buy MS Office?

Any advice from the iGeeks would be much appreciated.

Cheers,

Dave...

[1] And I must say that OSX 10.4 is a _lot_ nicer than the 10.2.8 or  
whatever we were running on Piers' old Powerbook. Still not as nice as  
Gnome (IMHO), but I could get used to it.

-- 
site: http://dave.org.uk/
blog: http://blog.dave.org.uk/