[OT] Mac Office Software

[Dominic Mitchell]

On Wed, Aug 23, 2006 at 11:29:12AM +0100, Dave Cross wrote:
> 
> 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?

If you just want a word processor and presentation software, then I
found Apple's iWork package to be very usable.  At around £, it's not
unreasonably priced.

    http://www.apple.com/iwork/

You're spot on about OpenOffice being utterly unusable though.  You
might want to try NeoOffice instead -- it's some kind of native OS X
port.  But the released version is only OOo 1.1 right now.  2.0 is still
in beta.

    http://www.neooffice.org/

-Dom