[mrtaxman]

I have a new Core2Duo iMac that came pre-installed with Microsoft Office, and my question is should I buy it now, or wait until they release a universal version?

[jasong]

If you need it now, get it now. If you don't need it now, wait until you do need it and buy the current version at that time.

Your trial version will only run for 30 days, and Office 2008 for Mac won't be out for at least 6 months.

[TETENAL]

If you can stand NeoOffice for 6 months, then wait.

http://www.planamesa.com/neojava/en/

[Phil333]

Another 6 months until the new office? Damn. I'm getting sick of Office for my MacBook. It's by far the slowest program w. the Intel chip.

[larrinski]

Originally Posted by TETENAL 

If you can stand NeoOffice for 6 months, then wait.

http://www.planamesa.com/neojava/en/

I agree. Use Neooffice for now, and save your docs as Office. As long as you don't use Templates it should work fine.

[TheoCryst]

Originally Posted by larrinski 

I agree. Use Neooffice for now, and save your docs as Office. As long as you don't use Templates it should work fine.

You can even save them as ODF, as Office 2008 will feature ODF compatibility.

EDIT: To answer the question, I'd suggest you wait for now, use Neo for a while, and then pick up Office 2008 when it comes out later this year.

[besson3c]

Abiword is also a great option:

fjf's (Cocoa) AbiWord for Mac (MacOSX) page

[wataru]

Originally Posted by TETENAL 

If you can stand NeoOffice for 6 months, then wait.

NeoOffice Home

That's what I was going to say too--I wouldn't buy Office at all!

[mitchell_pgh]

I would "borrow" it from a friend... and buy once the update comes out.

[Geofries]

Office is terribly slow on my MB.

[Person Man]

I've had no problems with the speed of Office 2004 on my 2.0 GHz C2D iMac at work. It's not noticeable to me at all, when compared to either my 1 GHz Ti PowerBook G4 or my dual 2.0 GHz Power Mac G5 at home.

[DuckRacer1]

Unless you need to use MS Office now, just wait. Office 2008 will run natively on Intel Macs, so with your C2D it should be much faster than 2004. I'd just use AbiWord or NeoOffice for the time being.

[Film Prof]

When I'm typing in larger Word files, there will occasionally be a noticeable lag between my typing and the appearance of the characters on the screen. I've also had a couple of weird issues with "invisible" text--the cursor is moving, but the words aren't appearing in the document.

I assume the Universal version of Office will take care of this?

And we're looking at a summer release?

[Bollo]

I've just installed office 2004 on my mbp but whenever i open excel, word or powerpoint i get a message that says-an unexpected error occured when opening windows framework-or words to that effect.
i was wondering if anyone could help or shed light on the matter

[Philip J. Fry]

Originally Posted by Bollo 

I've just installed office 2004 on my mbp but whenever i open excel, word or powerpoint i get a message that says-an unexpected error occured when opening windows framework-or words to that effect.
i was wondering if anyone could help or shed light on the matter

Go to your Documents folder and move the Microsoft User Data folder to the trash (don't empty it yet in case you need it again later) and re-open the programs.

[Peter]

buy it now.
Its too important to wait 6 months, and no one upgrades when Office is first out... too buggy!

[kcmac]

Where I work, we can buy it for $20. (Takes about 6 weeks for shipping though). If you can do this at work, or know someone that can, that is a good option until the new one comes out.

[Cadaver]

If you're livelyhood depends on it, then I say just suck it up and buy it.

If you can wait, or you have no other need for Microsoft Office other than it being the defacto standard, then give other apps a try. NeoOffice is pretty good. I've not had it crash and its Word-compatibility seems decent - very complex formatting will get lost, and some colored text doesn't seem to be exactly the same color when viewed in NeoOffice, but otherwise pretty good. The spreadsheet module, at least for my simple files, does just fine with Excel-compatibility. Haven't really played with the presentation module, but for basic things I understand it does reasonably well with PowerPoint compatibility.

Nisus Writer Express is a good word processor and its native file format is .rtf, so most Windows Office users will never notice you didn't send them a .doc file.

Apple's Pages is not too bad, either. Its OK as a basic word processor, though the page-layout templates may or may not be of use to you. Keynote is way, way better than PowerPoint, and does a good job of importing and exporting PowerPoint files. But be careful, if you make your own presentations, its easy to use features in Keynote that don't translate well in to PowerPoint.

I'm finding Office 2007 on Windows Vista to be really nice, actually (one of the few probably), so you could always consider running Parallels (though will end up costing much more than just buying Office 2004 for the Mac). Windows Office 2000 from what I've read is supposed to be very compatible with CrossOver VM engine for the Mac, so you could run it without needing to purchase Windows or setting aside hard drive space for a Windows installation.