iWork vs...
 

So my playground expanded to include Mac. :) I recently got a *smokin* deal on a G5 Power Mac. It's running OS X 10.5.2. My wife wants to view MS Word and PPT files emailed to her so other than installing Virtual PC or equiv what's the bomb Mac alternative? Is it iWork? It can't be OpenOffice...I've used it for a year or so on my Windoz machines no problems but on OS X it needs X11 and is a crashing whore. I have yet to get it working without a 60 second pause and several "this **** died unexpectedly" dialogs. So Mac faithful, what's the dealeo?

I'm super impressed with the G5 hardware. Back in H.S. I worked in a machine shop. My old manager would love to see this thing. Now I just need it to do a couple simple tasks...

David,
MS Office for Mac. Contains Word, PP, Excel, etc.

Files are cross-platform compatible as long as the PC file contains the requisite file suffix (e.g. .doc, .xls, .ppt, etc.).

Sherwood

I use NeoOffice. OpenOffice equivalent for the mac.

The Mac tech our company uses says the latest Mac Office 2008 software is leagues better than iWork. You can buy a student edition for $130. Entourage - the email portion of 2008, is supposed to be outstanding, and better yet, limitless as to how many emails you can store. I used a trial version of the latest Office 2008, and found it very trick. But be warned, its interface is much different from Office 2004.

Is Virtual PC even around these days? I thought Parallels was the only existing virtual OS for Mac. Personally, I use Boot Camp, which comes with OSX Leopard. It's very straightforward and reliable. It feels much more solid than Parallels, FWIW.

I'm still using Mac Office 2004 without any problems. And that is in an Exchange environment as well. I don't run windows at all.

Keynote is superior to Powerpoint, but Word is the defacto standards. Pages has some nice page layout features, but I don't really care for it as a word processor. Easier to stick with Word/Excel/Powerpoint, although for presentations and q'n'd animations I use Keynote.

Wife uses Mac Office 2004 on her powerbook, and I use Microsoft Office 2004 on my XP box. We swap files all the time (nudge, nudge, wink,wink), and problems are rare.

iWork is great, worth the money.

Well if she just needs to view them then use Quick Look.

Navigate to a file, any file, just about any format, pdf, .doc, .xls, video yadayada and then hit the spacebar.

The office suite under OS X has been touted by some as being a better product than the Windows counterpart. Don't think Office 2008 is much different on the Platforms but for sure 2004 and Office X were great suites.

I've been using OpenOffice 3.0.0 on my iMac and it's been fine. This version does NOT require X11 like previous versions did.

Thanks for the input folks. :)

I'm going with MS Office for Mac - found someone selling for cheap.