One of the purchases that I could have made when getting the Mac was Microsoft Office. I decided that I would not splash the extra cash, but would see how I got on without it.

My choices were iWork, consisting of Pages and Keynote and OpenOffice 2.2. iWork does not include a spreadsheet, so that ended up being on the backburner as the element of Microsoft Office that I use the most is Excel.

So, I downloaded and installed OpenOffice 2.2, which runs under the Mac OS X X11 server. Functionally it is great, and opens all my old spreadheets and wordprocessor documents like a dream. The spreadsheet even looks visually very close to Excel, and everything that I need is there.

The downside is that it doesn’t look or behave like a Mac application, all the keyboard shortcuts use ctrl instead of cmd and even then, not all of them work. I’m sure if I fiddle (Linux style) again then I’ll be able to get it feeling much nicer – but why bother. For the amount of time that I use Office apps then I think OpenOffice will be just the ticket. I must point out though, if the developers want mass-market appeal then these sorts of issues are probably the things that count. (Of course, last time I said anything like this a developer pointed out that the software is open source and I can pitch in and help if I wanted to).