If I don't want to go with MS Office for OS X, what are my compatible and cheaper options?

Which office components do you need? I'm a big fan of iWork, which handles Word and PPT files perfectly, but it doesn't have a spreadsheet program. You can use OpenOffice for that (or indeed for the whole package), although it's not as pretty or easy.

mr. flea likes OpenOffice.

What about carrots?

Word and Excel are going to be the two important parts of making my Powerbook more than a recreational machine. OpenOffice, you say? Let me google.

ita, look into NeoOffice/J. It's a port of OpenOffice for OS X specifically.

However, I must say: Both OO and Neo are, in my opinion, slow, bloated, and ugly to use. If you're going to be using them regularly, rather that just occasionally, I'd recommend finding a way to afford Office, which I've recently come to decide is actually good software. I mean, on a Mac it doesn't quite blend in with apple software the way it should, but OO and NeoOffice are even worse.

My opinion is based on the fact that a very simple spreadsheet opens in less time and pain using Excel on my 700 MHz G3 iBook than it did in NeoOffice on my Dual 1.8 GHz G5 Powermac with 1.5 GB of RAM.

However, I do use iWork (Pages and Keynote) instead of Word and Powerpoint, respectively, as I like them more. But Word has many features Pages does not (Equation Editor is a big one for people in my field, though I use LaTeX for my math stuff) so don't rely on iWork unless you've tested to make sure it really has everything you need.

Finally, you could probably go into the computer store of your local large university and grab a student copy of Office with no problems. Heck, you live in LA, and I know for a fact that the Caltech store does nothing so silly as check IDs or anything - they'll assume you're a postdoc, and you'll have no reason to correct them. Illegal, but less illegal than downloading, and a lot cheaper than buying it retail.

OpenOffice just recently released version 2.0. It might have improved. I use OpenOffice at home on a PC and find it adequate. Not as good as the Microsoft software, but ok. I haven't upgraded to 2.0 yet though. I don't know if it's slower on Mac. My home PC is a Athlon XP 2000+ based machine so it's pretty low end (very roughly between a 1.67 GHz G4 and a 1.67 GHz G5 in Mac Speak as far as I can tell) .

OpenOffice just recently released version 2.0. It might have improved.

I haven't really messed around with it yet, but it looks pretty much the same but with more features -- on the other hand, I recently heard that Google is throwing rafts of programmers at OOo, which should lead to some interface improvements.

I couldn't get regular OpenOffice to run on my iBook no matter what I tried. OO/J runs slow & bloated -- especially opening, it seems, but is pretty stable.

I'm thinking of getting iWork (is there a trial version I could try for cheap?) and switching to that for my word-processing, and dropping back to AppleWorks (whatever they call it now) for my fewspreadsheet needs.

I still miss FullWrite, which I thought was simple and elegant.

Theo, they ship a 30-day trial with new Macs but I haven't seen a downloadable version anywhere. If you didn't get the disk, maybe ask around among local (or, you know, here) Mac types to see if any of them have it?