Apple

OS X Office Suites

Last week I broke down and got Office X for my PowerBook. I would have preferred not to pay for another Microsoft package, much less one in which I’ll pretty much only use two of the four applications (Word and Excel). A couple factors drove me to doing it, but the main one is a lack of a viable Office suite on the Mac.

But what about OpenOffice? Yeah, I thought that would be the answer, too. Except it isn’t, and may not be for years. The recent announcement that a native OS X version wouldn’t be out until at least 2006 was disheartening but not surprising. It’s not a big priority for Mac developers - other apps that make fuller use of the operating system are more attractive and cooler, to boot - and so the porting of OpenOffice is a tiny volunteer enterprise. As the ever-astute John Gruber writes, “Wondering why your friendly neighborhood Mac developer doesn?t devote his nights and weekends to volunteering for OpenOffice is like wondering why your friendly neighborhood barber doesn?t spend his spare time giving free haircuts.”

So I bit the bullet and bought Office because I have to deal with lots of Word and Excel files and the current Mac version of OpenOffice, well, sucks. It doesn’t look like an OS X app and it doesn’t act like one. It’s slow and ugly and all those things I wanted to leave behind when I switched to Apple. The remaining hope, as Gruber points out, is that Apple comes out with a competing office suite. Eventually.

Well, at least I saved a bunch of money buying my Office X on eBay.