Office 2008 for Mac – it’s quite polished and I actually like the UI better than in Windows. It’s all just more jazzed up visually, including the weird icons. Cons – expensive, and doesn’t read the .odt format (an obvious dealbreaker for me, considering where I work). Sun has released an .odt converter for Office, but it’s (so far) only for Windows.

StarOffice 9/ OpenOffice 3.0 – in theory, these should be the best, with the nicest UI outside of MS (and arguably nicer, if you’re nostalgic for the pre-2007 Office before all the changes), along with full features and .odt support. There’s even a docx converter now (which works decently well on most documents, except for ones with heavy formatting). That being said, I’ve run into this terrible crippling error on both of them, which basically freezes the program after a while, especially for longer documents, or ones converted from .doc. It’s maddening, and it’s forced me to go back to NeoOffice. The good news is, I was on the phone with StarOffice project manager yesterday about an unrelated matter, and took the time to vent about this freezing problem. He’s going to look into the issue personally (I’m supposed to send him examples of documents that crash the program), and they’ll try to fix it right away. Here’s hoping…

NeoOffice – it’s slow and clunky compared to the others, but like your old faithful mule, it has the benefit of (almost) always working. I hate the ship icon. I’ve deleted it numerous times, only to have to reinstall it after StarOffice or OO fail me again. It’s like Olan in The Good Earth. There was a new “major update” a few weeks ago, which as far as I could tell, changed absolutely nothing. It sometimes has problems converting more heavily formatted.docs, and Excel spreadsheets as well.

As far as blogging software goes: sometimes it’s more convenient to use a local app, especially if you’re offline. Basically, I’m looking for a Mac equivalent of Windows Live Writer, a straightforward, easy-to-use blogging tool.

So why not get Office 2008 for the Mac and forget Parallels? I personally would never rely on iWork exclusively. In fact, I only use Pages to make nicer-looking invoices and newsletters. (I do, however, use Keynote exclusively and find it a pain to export to PPT. Also have had presentation issues if something happens at the last minute and I can’t connect my laptop.) If I didn’t get iWork and iLife for $39 each (academic discount), probably would never bother with iWork.

The Preview app does some amazing basic image editing, too. And get Skitch! Awesome screen capture/editing app. (One more: Adium is a great all-in-one IM tool.)

And isn’t all blogging “software” web-based, or am I missing something here? I use Blogger and WordPress, but all via the web.

Either way, have fun! And glad you escaped the Dark Side It’s a lot more fun over here.

Also remember that you’re running a BSD derivative, and you therefore have access to a wide variety of free unix tools, from the Gimp to ImageMagick. X11 programs are a little clumsier to run than native Aqua applications, but it is an alternative, especially if you want to script them.