mac word processors

I just bought a macbook for school and my 30 day microsoft office trial ended the other day. Looking at the price (300/$400) I thought no way am I going to buy...so I was wondering if OSX has any other word processors? I tried writing a paper with text edit yesterday but that definetely did not go well. If not, any free/low cost software out there that will do the job?

There is a $129 Microsoft Office Student Teacher edition. Since you need it for school, to me that would be the way to go. If that is still too much there is Apples iWork that has Pages and Keynote that does the same thing as Word and Power Point. It's pretty compatible with Office. It's $79. For free there is NeoOffice and OpenOffice that are pretty much a clone of Microsoft Office. They work well, but if you need for sure 100% compatibility for a school situation, I would recomend that $129 Microsoft Office.

For personal use you can also often buy the student and teacher version of office 2004 for 149$. At least that's the unofficial stance that Microsoft has indicated to some retailers apparently.

Aptmunich said:

For personal use you can also often buy the student and teacher version of office 2004 for 149$. At least that's the unofficial stance that Microsoft has indicated to some retailers apparently.

Click to expand...

Thanks, I'm going to look into that $150 Office for students. But just a minute ago I figured I would try IWork's trial that was preinstalled, but it couldnt complete the download. Specifically it said "error installing the software." Any idea why?

If it's preinstalled, why would you re-download it?

I use openoffice.org you need x11 to install it
its on your mac osx cd
its not bad for free

Or check out Neooffice/J for a version that doesn't require X11.

Check out Abiword, from www.abisource.com. It is an excellent open source (i.e. FREE) word processor. I use it all the time and it is great. It will read and write MS Word format and so it is an excellent tool. To be completely transparent however, I should mention that some of the trickier things that MS-Word can do with embedded figures can mess Abiword up now and then, but it is less often than more often. Overall, it is a wonderful package, and you can't beat the price! As they say in the open source world, it is "free as in beer".

Does anyone know if NeoOffice will run in spanish? I just reccommended it to one of my employees whose primary language is spanish.

Yes it will:

http://www.planamesa.com/neojava/es/index.php

It's amazing what you can find out about a product on its webpage.

I've recently tried NeoOffice as a free alternative to MS Office, and I'm pretty impressed so far. It doesn't do some of the advanced things MS Office does, such as PivotTables in Excel, but it does most of what I want, and the look and feel is eerily familiar.

Consider using bookworm - at least look into it.
You can keep files related to your ongoing report/essay/etc with your finished work - easy click-between access without paper clutter - it's cheap, too, compared to a lot of other things.
http://mac.softpedia.com/get/Word-Processing/BookWorm.shtml