Is there a way out ?

I agree with Paul that I like the Mac BU, especially because it push both Microsoft and Apple to innovate in this space. Pages will make Word better and vice versa. Same with the rest of the suites (and their growing Web, Open alternatives). After almost a decade of minimal competition (how could Microsoft have such a long development arc for all of its products), we have options. And that’s a great thing.

Of course NeoOffice doesn’t have the spit and polish or integration that iWork has either.

iWork is, IMO, a few tweaks away from being a more viable drop-in replacement for Office. However, it can easily handle most common WP and number crunching tasks for the average joe.

Whilst document *interchangability* is important, the reason I got iWork for my kids is precisely *because* they’re likely to come across Office anywhere else.

I’d rather teach them how to use word processing software than how to use Microsoft Word (TM). Goodness knows the schools (here in New Zealand at least) do not understand that basic concept!

Having cut my teeth on computers when graphics were a novelty I can understand and use a lot of software and am not limited to “Windows & Office” as many people I know are.

As a long time Excel power user, I would rate Numbers as “shows promise”. It doesn’t do well in some areas, and I’ve yet to get the hang of its “tables” paradigm. My main issue is the restrictive conditional formatting at the moment.

Pages and Keynote are plenty good enough for the pretty basic needs I have in those areas.

I just discovered the moving of documents that are being edited feature yesterday while revamping a songbook its quite nice.

I tried NeoOffice for a bit but found it really slow on my PPC mini. I hear that there is a native port of OpenOffice coming but its not final.
http://porting.openoffice.org/mac/

I use iWork 08 and NeoOffice and have no problems. I wouldn’t go back to Office if you paid me.

Nothing Microsoft can output can compare to the sheer amazingness of Pages, Numbers, and Keynote.

@pedant: Thanks, I’m getting a proofreader from now on. Interested?

@Julio: I took waiting into consideration, but needing something now, I resorted to iWork and the current Office edition. When’08 comes out I’ll give my thoughts on it.

@Nobody: The iPod won’t hook up to a VGA port, but if the projector has a standard RCA input (the red, white, and yellow plugs), you can purchase an A/V chord which will plug right in. From the iPod you can set your presentation to automatically transition from slide to slide, or you can physically use the click wheel.

I too made this transition, but mostly because my Office apps were taking an insane amount of time to start up, and then crashing repeatedly each session due to “an unexpected error.” Personally I would feel more comfortable if they could expect the error and prevent it.

I do my papers in Pages, my presentations in Keynote, and my spreadsheets and graphs in Numbers. All is well in my world. I take class notes (AND lecture recordings) in OmniOutliner Pro. Kick out the cash for this, it’s lightweight enough that (UNLIKE MS Word) I can surf the Internet for references to whatever my batty professors are talking about and copy the links to my notes as I type them/switch back and forth between OO and my web browser. This may not seem like an impressive feature, but it was impossible on a fairly new MacBook Pro for much of this past semester.

I too am interested to see what comes out of the new Office 2008. Since the release is scheduled before I graduate, I get a free copy…no guarantees that I’ll switch completely, but I hope Apple is paying attention (although I figure that if they do anything particularly cool, iWork will have beaten them to it).

One thing I’d like to learn more about is the use of the iPod in giving presentations. In my use case, you get a projector with a VGA input - does the iPod hook up to that? And I guess you press the click wheel to advance slides?

Mac Word Processors and Importing Word Documents