illustrating

Despite my many attempts to learn to love Mac iWorks' Numbers (pretty, but mostly useless when it comes to calculations and easily formatting them) and Mac Pages (which has simply dreadfully useless import and export filters), and even the MS Office suite (noting that MS Office 2011 for Mac OS X is extremely buggy), Apache OpenOffice.org remains my office application of choice.

There are still some serious limitations on its ability to export reliably to MS Word formats, so it is not suitable for editing some documents like CVs if certain people (like some recruiters) absolutely insist that you send them CVs in an MS Word format instead of as PDF, because they simply don't get that PDF is a publication format and MS Word is not, or because they insist on editing your CV to remove your identity before forwarding it to job clients because they are paranoid that their clients will then contact you directly, or because they insist on feeding your CV into certain keyword-matching programs that only accept DOC and that then send you automated job emails.

Otherwise, for all internal word processing, I use OpenOffice.org, not MS Word, and I use Open Office Calc, not Excel, for all of my internal spreadsheet work.

Visit also my remarks on OpenOffice Draw (Apache), which is a very handy drawing and illustration tool.