My Office options

if you use outdated software, aka, anything with 2.. you eventually have to upgrade (probably very soon, like next yr or two)
but if you are gonna upgrade soon, you might as well just use office for mac, and update when the new one comes out... at least this way, you'd be using the latest

if you don't care for outdated software, you'd still have better chance with office for mac, it'd be better than officexp with anything

 

office for mac via rosetta is faster than office 2003 via parallel, no idea about office xp... but feature wise is a whole different story

 

I use OpenOffice on X11. Rumor has it that they're releasing an OSX native version (there was a port called NeoOfficeJ that was quite good as well). Free and does everything Office does.

 

cross over will have issues when involving those inserted objects, so, if you are going to use office extensively, crossover is not an option, at least for now.
Although MS Office 04 is not UB, it works pretty fast on my MB, as long as you have >1G Memory.

 

n, it doesnt cover excel's advanced plotting function,

 

same situation

i'm in the same situation (still trying to decide if its worth buying parallel+xp or just buying ms office for apple). i just saw a deal for ms office thru compusa - $99 after $50 rebate. i totally missed out on the apple rebate for ms office but the compusa is just as good.

http://www.compusa.com/products/pro...fice_2004_for_Mac_Student_and_Teacher_Edition

 

I was in the same situation several months back. I bought the student version of MS office (for my kids) and I also downloaded Neooffice for free. At the time Neooffice was not a native OSX application, but it is now. Before you go out and spend your money you really aught to try Neooffice. It does everything MS office does and it is fully compatible with the files. Open source is really cool. In fact there are many applications like Gimpshop (Photoshop) and Openoffice that rival the originals.

If I had to do it over again I would not buy MS office and stick with Neooffice.

http://www.neooffice.org/

 

I am also a NeoOffice fan. 95% of my friends/family are pc users. not a one has ever asked/notice that I don't use microsoft office.
I can't speak to the higher end office uses but NeoOffice suits my basic needs very well.
And its free.