[OT] Mac Office Software

[Leslie Riggs]

I just went through this with the MacBook Pro for my son, who loved 
OpenOffice on his old Windows laptop.  But at the time we installed it 
on his MacBook, there was no English version yet, so my son has the 
German version.  Fortunately for him, he is intimately familiar with the 
menus enough that he can figure out what the English equivalents are for 
the German tabs and links.

I just checked and it is now available in English (translated from 
French).  When you go to the download page, there are columns of links 
for downloading, each column is for a different language - English, 
German, and French.  Just be sure you click a link in the correct 
language column and hopefully you will have a brand, spanking-new 
version of OO2 for the MacBook (which, by the way, is Intel-powered - at 
least, my son's is).

Leslie

>
> 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.
>