Alternatives to MS Office for Mac
 

Can also be titled as alternatives to MS Entourage/Outlook.

Been running Office 2008 on my MacBook for years. It's starting to get buggy, notably it is now "Upgrading Identity..." and "Upgrading Messages...", been doing that for an hour and I'm glad I do regular back-ups. Entourage has been crashing hard about once every 2 months so you have to rebuild the db. Excel will also do strange things like open the last file when the application is opened. It's also done odd linking of one file to other files. That's the one I'm most worried about.

Reading Office 2011 reviews, I have no desire to upgrade.

Any suggestions for a robust email and calendaring program for the Mac?

Any suggestions for "cleaning" Office preferences and alike for a fresh start?

I'm using Open Office for viewing spreadsheets on my Mac at home. My email and calendar are all done through Google. I actually really like the Google calendar.

The iWorks suite, Pages and Numbers. $45, it's good deal, includes Keynote.

For Open Source there is also Libre Office, works OK but I'd spend the money on iWorks first.

I find Appples Mail works fine. Good alternative is Thunderbird.

To "clean" MSFT prefs pretty much just move your Identity profile and it will build a new one on relaunch.

User/Documents/Microsoft User Data/Office 2008 Identities

I use iWorks suite for everything I do - more than adequate. I've used Open Office in the past as well - also quite good.

There is absolutely no reason to shell out hundreds of dollars for Microsoft Office Suite anymore. They've milked that cow to death over the last 15 or 20 years simply repackaging the same three tools (spreadsheet, word processor, presentation builder). OK four tools if you count Outlook, which is a giant set of headaches unto itself.

Have you tried apple mail as an alternative to Entourage? If you still like Microsoft Office, you could try running the Windows version of office (2011/2013) with Crossover. I use to do that and it ran very well. The Mac version of office is a joke. To try it, you could download a trial of crossover and Office 2013.

Crossover
Office 2013 Trial

Apple's own Mail and Calendar work well. For office apps I use Open Office, my kids use Google Docs. I haven't tried Apple's office apps but they are now free.

Clarification.

Free with new hardware purchases.

openoffice or libroffice for actual documents. for calendar invites i use thunderbird with the lightning plugin. cant see my coworkers calendars but can invite them, respond to invites etc

Free upgrade but be very careful. I now find that iWorks 08 files will not open with the new iWork's downloaded updates. Get a message "files are too old", I have spreads and other docs and now have to use both iWorks 08 and new iWorks to update any files. I was pretty disappointed when I saw this. Hoping this can be corrected with a future update.