And I'd place money on the final released product STILL not looking like a polished modern Macintosh application produced by the resources of a multi-billion dollar software company.

Instead, like previous versions of Office, it'll have the UI gumption of ‘here's how we make it familiar enough for Windows users who in a bizarre set of circumstances are forced to sit in front of a Mac in order to use versions of Word and Excel built from a completely separate code-base to their Windows counterparts’. The most ridiculous thing about this is, aside from the fact that this scenario is probably incredibly rare, Windows users want an application that looks and feels like Windows (and the Office team can rarely resist ‘innovating’ there), and Mac users just want an application that looks and feels like the other Mac apps they have installed: so long as the applications have the same features and can read and write the same files, there's no magical UI reinvention needed.

Microsoft would do well to spend time and resources giving Office:mac applications a unified look, with sane toolbars, property inspectors and a snappy responsive UI. Oddly enough, because usability's quite important on the desktop, and being consistent with other applications on the platform is part of that.

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I'm a year old switcher and about to take the next step and replace all the windows machines in my small business office (was waiting for CS now waiting for the next mac pros appear). Microsoft Office is the one app I've had trouble finding a convincing mac alternative for. I'm not going to pay out for 5 copies of a non universal app and to be honest even when MO2008 does arrive I can't see myself forking out that kind of cash. I've been testing NeoOffice etc but I'm yet to be convinced that they'll provide the kind of solid performance I need to avoid having to sort out compatability problems all day. If anyone's in a similar position I'd be interested to hear if you've come up with a solution.

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Jimmy Jazz,

I've found Keynote to be better than Powerpoint for presentations, so that's one problem solved.

As a Word alternative, I don't think Pages is quite good enough, yet, but it's almost there. I could see the problems being solved in iWork 07, which I'm sure will be released at WWDC in June.

There is no spreadsheet app, which is a shame. There was a rumor one was coming in iWork 07, so we'll have to wait and see.

Otherwise, another alternative is using online tools such as the Google Office suite. I've found it to be reasonably good for basic stuff. If you just need it for basic word processing and aren't doing much intensive spreadsheet work, it might be a very viable solution.

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Thanks for your thoughts Andrew. If iWork 07 could open our legacy Word and Excel files and save them in a non destructive way so that they will be readable on our clients Windows Office set-up then I'll be happy. We are not what I guess you would call 'power users' of either app. We produce a lot of files but they are all reletivly simple. Like you say wait and see, there's a lot of waiting in this switching game...

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Jimmy Jazz:

Agreed with other commenters that Keynote is a great alternative to PowerPoint. If you need a word processor, try Mariner Write or Nisus Writer Express. For spreadsheets, look at Mariner Calc. Honestly, I don't know why people continually overlook Mariner. There's also Mesa if you just need a lightweight spreadsheet.

Also, look into Think Free's products.

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No virtual basic, no more Office. This will be the last installment of Office on the Mac. Rather than wait a few years, and make it so Virtual Basic could run on Mac Office -- in the meantime, we live with Rosetta-Office, which is fine -- they are coming out with this which will kill compatability. Sales die. MS puts up its hands and says no one is buying Mac office, and that's the end of it.

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Jimmy Jazz: Take a look at NeoOffice (a Mac OS X-specific fork of OpenOffice.org).

There are a few things it can't do, and it's not the fastest kid on the block (though once it's running it seems snappier than Word or Excel on my MacBook), but as a ‘Universal Binary Office alternative’ it's possibly the best of a not hugely great bunch.

My hope is that NeoOffice will sort out some of the performance problems and tweak the UI/experience further to be more fitting for a Mac suite of applications (for example, there's no obvious way to switch between the spreadsheet and word processor without first launching the application with an empty word processing document), and continue to pull in upstream updates from OpenOffice.org with regards to Office for Windows compatibility. If they can do that, I suspect Office:mac will only end up existing for the distinct minority.

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The latest version of Office 2004 is still in Alpha? One UI scrapped. Windows Office 2007 already out the door. What have these folks been doing? Talk about drawing pay. Maybe M$ has money to throw at the problem if they intend to eventually drop it, like GM and the electric car.

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Jimmy Jazz -- speed may not be the issue for you, but if it was I'd relax about running Office under Rosetta. Office goes way faster on a new Mac with Rosetta than it does on my G3 iBook (600Mhz with 640Mb RAM). And, even with my now aging setup, I've not ever found Office performance an issue for small business tasks. As a complete aside, most of the other alternatives mentioned (Nisus, NeoOffice, Pages) are unusable on a machine of my vintage, they go so slowly.

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