I was curious to which office suite people preferred, either iWorks, the one from Apple; Office, the one from Microsoft; and NeoOffice, the open source and free alternative.

On windows I did like Office and the new 2007 layout. Therefore, when I got my Macbook I decided to try out Office 08 for Mac. I really disliked it, seemed too flashy for me and didn't really suit my work flow. The plethora of inspector windows to the right was clumsy for me.

Therefore, I did try out iWorks 08 (Pages, Numbers, Keynote). I am really impressed with the full selection. Pages isn't as powerful as word but has a very simple, elegant layout and discovered that it had a sidebar last night which comes in very handy, much better than the inspectors used in Office Word. Keynote, no matter of a doubt is superior to Powerpoint in my opinion - there are more effects which are more advanced and professional in my opinion. The whole software just seems very elegant and polished. Numbers is no were near as powerful as Excel but I use it so infrequently, that it doesn't particularly matter to me and as an addition, the graphs are very cool

iWorks seems to be aimed at the general home user in my opinion, not as a full professional suite like word but I like it all the same and have subsequently removed Office 08 from my Macbook.

As for NeoOffice, I haven't really tried it as I am comfortable with iWorks now so any thoughts on that would be quite interesting.

So, what do you use, what do you prefer and why?

Having PDF abilities at the core of OSX makes it really handy, I really disliked Acrobat so its just an easy convert in Pages to PDF or even DOC file types

For the price, iWorks is really worth it in my opinion.

I voted for iWork because its the easiest way for me to create something that looks good.  For the most part, I don't need all the features from Office that iWork is missing.  The one thing I do use Word for is typing notes.  As a teacher, I type my notes and put blanks in to hand out to students.  Once they're typed I can send them to PowerPoint.  If its formatted as an outline, Powerpoint will break them up into slides for me.  iWork and Neooffice don't have this capability.  So, unfortunately, I'm stuck using Word.

I'm just so fearful of actually installing office on my mac.  I installed the old one and it messed up my fonts so badly I basically had to reinstall. And that *bleeping* updater would run constantly!

So I use VMWARE Fusion and run Microsoft Office and other windoze apps on my MacBook that I can't run normally.  I tried looking at Iwork, but the charting functions and worksheet layout were very strange.  Every excel file I have opened in Iwork looks nothing like it does in excel.  It took me years to understand excel and I need to stay with a common platform that other PC users can recognize.

google docs?

I have a full version of Office 2007 for windows and was planning on installing it on my Vista bootcamp, but to be honest I am not sure I will...

After going freelance I don't really use any office applications any more, so I might just use iworks..

I use Microsoft Office 2008. But have used both iWork´08 and NeoOffice too.

That day Numbers´08 be filly compatible with Excel, that day i go from MS Office.