Office 2007 For Mac Will Be Late. I Care.

The scandal of this whole thing is that they are late with a de-featured product! Instead of adding new features they are actually taking important ones away. To ship this without Office Basic is incomprehensible. It will push everyone over the edge to NeoOffice or iWork. If you cannot participate in your companies' Office workflow you've basically said that its for personal use only- you can open and edit text only.

Microsoft is obviously threatened by Apple's resurgence and is looking to do anything in its power to neuter the threat. Considering they just signed an agreement to maintain Office on the Mac- if I were Apple I'd let it be known that losing important corporate features is a breach of contract and an anti-competitive act by a monopoly. Or just go ahead and turn iWork into a full featured Office killer- and port it for good measure!

Arik: I've been quite impressed with Gmail as a Web-based email system, but it can't touch Entourage (or any of the other higher-end email clients available for the Mac) when it comes to functionality beyond basic reading and filing/categorizing.

That said, you're right that the later the next version of Office is, the more incentive people will have to explore alternatives.

I have been very impressed with Pages' ability to read MS Word documents. Apple has a modest amount of work needed for true Word compatibility (e.g. page and table borders, embedded font support)

I look forward to an Excel competitor including support for Solver and Crystal Ball.

With these plus an overhauled toolbar (a la Office's forthcoming ribbon) and ODF file format support, I can replace Office with iWork.

Unless you use Safari, in which case you can forget using Writely or Spreadsheets.

You should try iWork, dude...it rocks.

I have iWork and I can tell you that it's a nice program, but not a real Office replacement. I would recommend iWork for students and everyday home use. What I would recommend to replace Office - for free - is NeoOffice. You can get it at http://www.neooffice.org/ and you will like it. A lot. It offers everything Microsoft Office has and then some, in a much nicer package. Plus, it's free. I'm not even a big fan of open source. But I'd pay money for that program (hopefully a more reasonable price than MS Office, like, say $99 or less).

Guy in next office became the first Microsoft-free zone in the building. I quickly followed with my first try of iWork. It does have it's limitations for technical writing, it's fully worthy of imorting and exporting Office files, so now I've quite using Office as well. As for Excel?, Mariner's Calc works fine.

Take the plunge people. The non-microsoft water is fine, and even more effective.

You might also take a look at Nisus Writer Express 3.0. It's pretty Word compatible. Fewer features, but it's solid and faster.