Office for Mac ?

[Mammoth]

i know office is pricey BUT i will tell you that office 2004 is great and the subs wont give you all the bells and whistles. I REALLY enjoy it and could never imagine being without it. !

good luck

It sure blows when it's not an UB.

 

[lOUDsCREAMEr]

your askin for sth thatz NON-EXISTENT!!

if your ok wit Neooffice's crawling speed, some compatability problems with ms office formats, & essentially no "PowerPoint" templates, then Neooffice is your choice..

if you just want Word like processor, you may consider Abiword, but ugly interface, and same compatability problems with ms office formats just like Neooffice

 

[Lollypop]

Im asuing she is a student, she can get student discount on office... I know most of the other alternatives are free or cheap, but I love Office:mac, much better than the windows version, and witht he exception of a few activeX issues 100% compatible.

 

[brandon6684]

If you need the full office suite, about the only real option other than MS Office is NeoOffice. If you don't need a spreadsheet, iWork is nice, though pages isn't the best word processor(though decent amateur page layout), but Keynote is really good for presentation. If you're like a large number of people and just need a Word replacement, AbiWord is free and light weight, and quite nice.

 

[miles01110]

LaTeX is great but it's a whole other thing than Office, so I don't think this is a good alternative in this case.

LaTex is a perfect substitution for MS Word. Keynote owns PowerPoint. NeoOffice or Google Charts for Excel. So, instead of paying $300 for Office, this solution is around $90 or whatever keynote costs.

 

[dpaanlka]

If you need the full office suite, about the only real option other than MS Office is NeoOffice. If you don't need a spreadsheet, iWork is nice, though pages isn't the best word processor(though decent amateur page layout), but Keynote is really good for presentation. If you're like a large number of people and just need a Word replacement, AbiWord is free and light weight, and quite nice.

If I were to describe Pages vs Word, I would say what pages lacks in ultra hardcore word processing features (which I haven't actually found anything missing in Pages, I only hear rumor that there are) it makes up for in it's excellent page layout abilities. I write tons of university-level papers in Pages just fine, and my professors and classmates can open them just fine in Word, and I can open their Word documents just fine.

I can also open PowerPoints fine in Keynote. Sometimes the advanced graphic features of Keynote do not make it back over to PowerPoint users, though.

Pages really is sort of a page layout / word processor hybrid.

 

[APPLENEWBIE]

Conspiracy by Microsoft?

If I were MS, and if I wanted to hurt the Mac world, I could simply elect never to make MS Office for Mac a universal binary... and let it be known that I never will. For many people, MS office is at least a perceived necessity (though there are alternatives) and the lack of availability of MS office would be a deal breaker. I have actually been holding off buying an intel mac for myself (I got one for my son for graduation) because MS Office is not yet UB. Or maybe I am just weird...

 

[mhuk01]

i'm just checking, office for mac (microsoft) isn't universal is it? so presumably the best office application for intel macs is openoffice?

 

[ArthurS]

i'm just checking, office for mac (microsoft) isn't universal is it? so presumably the best office application for intel macs is openoffice?

No. As far as I am concerned, currently Office 2004 is leaps and bounds ahead of the competition on OS X (Keynote-Powerpoint being the only exception). On my MacBook, Office 2004 still loads faster than NeoOffice 2.0 despite the former being PPC-only.

 

[dpaanlka]

i'm just checking, office for mac (microsoft) isn't universal is it? so presumably the best office application for intel macs is openoffice?

No... how did you come to that conclusion??

iWork is fully intel native. Keynote is leaps and bounds ahead of PowerPoint. Pages is a fine word processor too, lacking only the most hardcore features from word, but also adding a lot more Page Layout capabilities than Word has, which in my mind actually makes it better. And the iWork package is so cheap, and is full Apple so is integrated amazingly with the OS as well as iLife. Plus, iWork '07 is supposed to have the long-awaited spreadsheet app.

I'd say the big future battle of the Mac productivity suites is going to be Office vs iWork. OpenOffice.org will have no part in it.