baobab

What's the best productivity software for a macbook? Or what about those free alternatives like Open Office?

I might choose to be a bio major so I might require Excel. But in any case I'll require a suitable powerpoint (or substitute) / word processor.

I'm most used to microsoft office 2003.

revolversun

I asked myself the same thing a while ago, and after doing extensive research, I realized that Office for Mac is the best choice. Your professors may be running windows machines, and as such, will expect windows oriented work and documents. Office for Mac will get this done, and is a fine program.

Try buying it on campus though. I nearly bought it at the Apple Store for $150 (that's including a student discount) but realized I could buy it on my college campus for $40. No joke.

srunni

iWork opens Office documents as well, including the new Office 2007 XML format. Unless you have a moral problem with giving money to the big M$, it really doesn't matter either way.

y0itzr0

neooffice is free, and it works great. check it out. it can read office files and iwork files.

srunni

And when OpenOffice 3 comes out, it will have native OS X support, so there'll be no more need for NeoOffice.

olgita

I have tried using open office on my PC, but it has trouble properly displaying diagrams created in MS Word. Also, I found it to be slower.

srunni

Yeah, the advanced formatting options from Word haven't been reverse engineered yet. You can speed up OpenOffice a bit with some changes in the preferences, but it's written in Java, so it's definitely going to be slow. On the whole, LaTeX is better

diehldun

I would unconditionally recommend getting Microsoft Office '08 for Mac INSTEAD of iWork, as much as I usually support Apple software. IMO there is simply no comparison between the two suites, and Word/Excel are still the standard to use. Keynote, on the other hand...