Using MS Office vs. other options.

I'm switching to Mac but planning to stay with Office at this point. (My University has a license that gives me use of it for free).

What are my other spread sheet, word processing, data base, and presentation software options that work well or better but also wont have all the PC people curseing my name everytime I need to send them a file.

In otherwords....how could I break from MS completely and still work seemlessly with all the unconverted?

Abdiel said:

I'm switching to Mac but planning to stay with Office at this point. (My University has a license that gives me use of it for free).

What are my other spread sheet, word processing, data base, and presentation software options that work well or better but also wont have all the PC people curseing my name everytime I need to send them a file.

In otherwords....how could I break from MS completely and still work seemlessly with all the unconverted?

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You can use OpenOffice (www.openoffice.org)
You can save, open, edit in MS formats...
Best of all its FREE!!

Open Office would be a great program to use on the Mac. It has versions on just about any platform that you could name. It is free, but you will have to run X11 along with it, which can be downloaded from Apple, also free. It gives you compatability with Word, Excel, so you can trade files back and forth with those less fortunate that only have pc's.

There is also NeoOffice\J which is an OS X version of Open Office, also free and you don't need the extra X11 with it, however, Open Office is better supported and would probably have better updates for it though NeoOffice works quite well.

Is there any particular reason for me to do that though...I guess this is my real question.

Is Open Office better than MS Office or is it more of a symbolic gesture of MS defiance?

Abdiel said:

In otherwords....how could I break from MS completely and still work seemlessly with all the unconverted?

Click to expand...

Honestly, you can't. MS Office remains the only option if 100% seamless compatibility is the goal.

Abdiel said:

Is there any particular reason for me to do that though...I guess this is my real question.

Is Open Office better than MS Office or is it more of a symbolic gesture of MS defiance?

Click to expand...

Being free, open source, and not a MS product are probably the biggest attractions for these alternatives, rather than actual superiority from an application standpoint. That being said, the one alternative I do prefer is AppleWorks for most of my needs. The only time I use Office is when I need to share files with other Office users, so that I can be assured of the 100% compatibility that I mentioned above.

Padawan said:

Honestly, you can't. MS Office remains the only option if 100% seamless compatibility is the goal.
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That's about it. OpenOffice can get you "close enough" for most needs, but if you must have MS Office compatibility (especially if your job/contracts depend on it) then MS Office is your only option.

I got the S&T Edition of Office 2004 (Mac) and it's great. It costs $149 and comes with three licenses. I use my mac for work and the Entourage app is awesome, even better that MS Outlook 2000, imo.

The best advantage of OpenOffice? It is free. But you can get MS Office for free so i recomend you to keep using it. There will allways be issues of compatibility with any other Office-like suite.

Well, when I got my iBook, I was trying to be 100% Microsoft-free but I simply just couldn't do without MS Office. It's just too good. I tried OpenOffice but didn't like the fact that it uses X11 which makes it slow to boot and other free ones were buggy or something. IMO, nothing beats MS Office in terms of what it does but if you really must have a free office suite and be MS-free, then OpenOffice ain't too bad.

If you're only looking for basic word processor capabilities and a decent Presentation software, take a look at iWork '05.

KEynote 2 is awesome for presentations and pages is cool for visually attractive booklets, letters, brochures etc. It's only lacking a bit in the general scope of its word-procesor capabilities.

IMO office is a must have for that one file that wont keep its formatting but i did all my dissertation in Open Office as well as most of my other uni assignments.

Yea its slows and runs alot better in Linux but if you can live with it then i perfere it to M$ Office