I picked up Neooffice and iWork family pack this past spring. I had Office 2003 at work and I considered getting Office 2008 as a third option for dealing with Office docs. At work, they "upgraded" us from 2003 to 2007. What a mess. Those ribbons require about triple the clicks to get routine things done. There are bugs that make my work more difficult. I decided to make do with Neooffice and iWork at home indefinitely. Later, I heard that Office 2008 didn't use the lame ribbon thing and I thought about it again, briefly. For now I'm sticking with neooffice and iwork. So far, I've been able to live with my decision and it is unlikely I will fork over $150 for Office because there are 4 users here and you only get 3 users at that price. For me to cover all 4 users here, I would have to fork over $300 to M$. Ain't gonna happen. Here are some tradeoffs I noticed:
Keynote vs Office vs Neooffice -- Keynote is the clear winner though occasionally there are files Neooffice can open accurately that Keynote cannot.
Numbers vs Excel vs Neoffice/Calc -- Excel would be the winner here. Numbers and Calc don't quite measure up to Excel when dealing with large spreadsheets with thousands of rows. But I decided to live with it rather than deal with Office. I find Neoffice Calc does a better job of opening and saving Excel docs than does Numbers. I should be able to pick xls as the default file save format. I really should.
Pages vs Word vs Neoofice/Writer --- Here, once again, Word could be the winner. But the compromises posed by Pages and Writer aren't that big a deal. I find Neooffice Writer does a better job of opening and saving Word docs than does Pages. Once again, I should be able to pick doc as the default file format.
90% of the people I email things to cannot see anything but ppt, xls, doc and pdf. That whole "export" dialog in iWork to save documents in formats readable by 90% of the people in the world is a joke.
Then along comes price and a clear winner emerges: Neooffice. It's free, works reasonably well and reads and writes Office files natively. Bravo! In second place is iWork which costs around a hundred bucks for a family pack of 5 licenses. Not bad at all. Bringing up the rear is M$ Office 2008. At $150 for the least expensive edition, you only get 3 copies. Clearly the "family pack" is a concept M$ hasn't heard of. If you're deciding what to get and you just bought iWork, at $20 per user you clearly didn't make a mistake. Even M$ Office isn't that bad of a deal at $50 per user if you use all 3 licenses. But the best way to get Office capability on your Mac instantly for FREE is Neooffice. Whenever I set up a new Mac, the first 3 programs I install are Quicksilver, Neooffice and Gimp.
