When I heard OS X 10.7 was dropping Rosetta it meant that the last version of Word I could tolerate, 2004 would no longer run. I'm a writer by profession so whether or not I'm comfortable with my word processor is important. I had been chanting that I'd move away from Word to Pages or OpenOffice for a couple years now, all dependent upon when 2004 stopped running. That time came sooner than expected.
The other day I was looking for some decent resume templates and Word had none. Pages is only $19.99 at the app store, and I remember from the very first version that its templates were nice. This was a perfect time for me to evaluate Pages and OpenOffice side by side and finally dump Office.
I used OpenOffice enough in Linux to have a general idea about it. No complaints. I even used it back when it was called StarOffice. The question was really how well it performed and integrated into OS X. While it's not bad, it still doesn't feel like a native Mac app -- because it isn't. NeoOffice alleviates that problem to some extent, but it always felt sort of like a clumsy hack -- because it pretty much is.
The last time I used Pages it was 1.0, PPC only, and cost about $49-59 I believe. "Beyond Microsoft" was actually written in the first version of Pages, on my old iBook, at a coffee shop. At my old job I needed to do page layout frequently, and Pages is a champ at that. At the time it didn't have grammar check though, and although I'm not a horrible writer, it tends to catch typing mistakes. I continued using it for page layout, but not writing.
Pages is at version 4.5 right now and more advanced, as you'd expect after four major revisions. In 1.0 there were minor issues, like not being able to set a default margin and no thesaurus or dictionary integration. Now OS X has a system wide dictionary, thesaurus, and grammar check. The application is responsive, something I could never say about Word. It naturally feels like a Mac app since Apple designed it. The full screen mode is cool too. OpenOffice has more capabilities, but are they ones that I'll actually use? Probably not any time soon. Pages' interface just feels more 'alive' for lack of a better description. Since its a native Cocoa app I have access to things like speech.
I should have prefaced this by saying I was a bit dumbfounded by the OpenOffice / LibreOffice split and opted to test LibreOffice throughout all of this (despite saying OpenOffice numerous times). It seems like LibreOffice will be the future, but as long as Sun/Oracle holds onto the OpenOffice name the general public may be confused. Personally, both sides' developers have good arguments for their respective forks. Choosing between the two was complicated enough for me; I can't imagine how a layman would feel.
While I'm primarily concerned with Word I also downloaded Numbers to replace Excel. I haven't used it too much yet, but given that I never use Excel's more advanced features it should be fine. Thankfully I haven't had to give any presentations lately, but Keynote has obliterated PowerPoint since the very first version. No exaggeration.
Office was the final MS app I had on my machine. Now I am no longer a hypocrite and completely free of MS.
