Well Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac has been out for awhile now and overall it is a good thing.  First of all it has been a long time coming as it was one of the few big programs left for the Mac that had not been update for the Intel chip on the current Macs.  It also brings to the forefront the new “.docx” format that Office for PC is also using in their 2007 version.  Now this new format can also cause problems as not everyone has upgraded yet and old versions cannot display docx files.  But it will eventually switch over.  Office 2008 is not without it’s flaws, though.  The original installer has some issues with how it writes permissions to the files on your computer (this was later fixed in an update) Also it seems to be a little slow to me loading up.  It’s probably because it’s pretty bloated.  And of course, the price is still up there, unless you can gets your hands on the educational version.

Well here comes OpenOffice 3.0 for the Mac.  OpenOffice is an opensource (free) version of “Office” that has been around for awhile.  Only recently have they gotten it fully native working on the Mac.  It provides 95% of the same features of Office with no cost to you.  I am happy with it so far, and it loads up pretty fast!  It is still officially beta but seems to work pretty well and should come into full release not too long from now.  It does only work on Intel macs, but there is another option called NeoOffice that can be used on a PPC mac.

You can get it from here:

http://download.openoffice.org/3.0beta/

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 11th, 2008 at 10:15 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.