Our company got on Microsoft's Enterprise list so that we can get cheap software from them. The company gave us links to download the latest versions of Office for Mac and Windows.

Remarkably I have been able to avoid having to run Office on my Mac in the 3 years since I became a switcher. iWork has always been enough for me even when Pages formats incorrectly. So on Friday night I decided to download it and give it a try.

After installing, I tried out Word and Excel and wasn't very impressed. I think I am going to stay with Pages and Numbers. While the apps don't look very Windows like, they still stink of Microsoft for some intangible reason. Maybe it is mental. I did open some of my docs that I got from my Windows colleagues and the docs do look better in Word than Pages. Pages just feels cleaner to me. At least Word and Excel on Mac don't have the hideous Ribbon.

The one part of the suite I will probably try and stick with is Entourage (Outlook on the Mac). The Calendar support in iCal is just atrocious. Whenever I get a meeting request from my PM, the time of the meeting is always 3 hrs behind due to the time zone. I guess iCal just never assumes you'll take a meeting in a different time zone. Entourage figured it out OK. I did have to tweak the Entourage UI away from that horrible 3 column window approach. I changed the UI layout to be more like Apple Mail. I also had to disable the hideous sounds any time the program did any kind of action.