...as the openoffice on a pc totally impressed me & made me think 'one less reason to own a mac' - between mozilla & openoffice one can do many, many things...

I really was hoping this would come to OS-X - I find the X-11 version quite unuseable & graphically unappealing...

NeoOffice is an Aqua-wrapped version of OpenOffice.org.

http://www.neooffice.org/

And bobo, don't be sad, OpenOffice isn't that great but if you must have it, NeoOffice is the thing to use.

I recommend NeoOffice/J too. All I use it for is to open Word, Excel, and Powerpoint files. Been able to open all the ones from my sister so far. btw: I don't mind X11 Open Office if they were to put everything other than X Windows in an app bundle. The problem now is you have to compile dependencies to be able to run it on OS X. And I can compile things easily in 3 steps on Linux with Make but I don't know how to do it on OS X.

compiling dependencies isn't any harder on OS X using make. There might be some tweaks necessary to pass to the compiler, but it isn't much different than under linux.

Apple should take over the development for Open Office for Mac. kOffice has done a great job with UI, but again it is not Aqua.

I just got iWorks and am going to fool around with it soon (Keynote v1 was great - I used it for everything). Still, nothing would spell out Apple's commitment to the office worker than picking up the open standards and unified UI of Open Office.

Can an Open Office for Mac, built by Apple, coexist with Keynote and Pages? I hope so.

Aside from the likelihood of this standing somewhere below zero, it wouldn't make any sense at all. I don't see the "unified UI" as a plus in any sense, as it means the UI does NOT unify with the OS. But if you want that you can always install the X11 version. As for open standards, how does OO.org support them any more than iWork?

If you want OO.org for Mac, best you're gonna do is NeoOffice/J. I just used it recently for a report, and while it still has a long way to go in terms of OS X integration, surprisingly everything seemed to work just fine.

At least the upcoming Apple iWork makes this less of a concern that it would have been a few months ago, because we are still ensured a good alternative to Microsoft Office, except of course for the lack of a spreadsheet application. Yet, iWork requires a purchase, whereas Open Office is free, which is the main idea. Fortunately, also, the dastardly Microsoft has not been as lax about Office development as we were worried would be the case by now according to past predictions, other than Internet Explorer, which continued to lag pitifully behind until its death. Again, Apple made up for that with Safari, and the open source community came through with the even better alternative of Firefox.

From a business perspective, OpenOffice is more promising. I can see many businesses using it across the board in the coming years. It would certainly help the Mac's reputation in those places if it ran OpenOffice. IT departments are not always interested in better software, just software that's the same.

...just reading the iSync known issues with Palm/iCal & data corruption & deletion I have to believe Apple doesn't really care about the business market (an aside - Intuit apparently just terminated Quickbooks in Canada) I had looked to Open Office as a way to say to people 'you can compete with a Mac cost wise against a PC and still get 'real' work done'...

Neo Office looks promising & OpenOffice doesn't look like it is going away soon, although I think I read somewhere that MS now owns copyrights in it and can go after you if it is worth their effort?

iWork is good enough. Pple in business are going to use MS Office anyhow. And NeoOffice is great for those anti-MS zealots. What a happy world.