Office apps for Mac - your choice?

[Lankyman]

I was discussing the following today with colleagues at work three of whom are Mac owners like myself - word processing email applications etc.

We all agreed that for productive office workflow whether it be in the office or a home office, MS Office for Mac is by far the best option. I think that Office for Mac 2011 Business edition is a really good product. I have always liked it on the Windows side but 2008 for the Mac wasn't their best effort. However, the 2011 version is very good and so is Outlook email client. I also use Open Office for the Mac and for a free product it is hard not to like it. I have tried many times to like Pages but for a productive office enviroment linked with Mac Mail I find it doesn't really cut the mustard.

I rate them as follows -
1. Word for Mac 2011 with Outlook
2. Open Office with Thunderbird email client
3. Pages with Mac Mail

Browsers -
Chrome for speed
Firefox for add-ons etc.
Safari - don't use it

What are others opinions?

 

[ScottNWDW]

Personally I love Word 2011 and Pages.
I use Word for things I know I will need to share or for items that I need for work.

For my personal stuff I prefer Pages.

I loved Outlook on Windows, but it just wasn't doing anything for me on the Mac. The Mail application that comes with the Mac is just fine.

 

[gorskiegangsta]

My personal preferences are:

Office Suites:
1. MS Office for Mac 2011 (Excel has no equal, Word is excellent too)
2. iWork (Keynote beats PowerPoint in almost everything, Pages is also very good)
3. Google Docs (Love the cloud syncing feature, once they implement full offline support, it'll be on par with Office and iWork for me)
4. LibreOffice or OpenOffice


Browsers:
1. Chrome (Personal favorite, excellent integration with Google services, fast, tons of addons, excellent sync feature)
2. Safari (Best integration with OS X (naturally) and most resource efficient)
3. Opera
4. Firefox

Email Apps:
1. Sparrow (My absolute favorite, interface is light years ahead of everyone else, a ton of features too)
2. Mail (the Lion version is much better)
3. Thinderbird
4. Outlook​

 

[Lankyman]

What I should have perhaps added as a comment in my original post. Whilst MS Office for Mac 2011 is a huge improvement on the 2008 debacle I still think the Windows version of MS Office is by far the best.

One could argue why should MS develop for a competing platform. My reply would be that with Mac gaining in popularity MS should want to showcase one of its premier products in order to keep market share.