I haven't gotten a copy of Office v.X from my "contact" yet, so I figured I'd try out OpenOffice. I followed the directions found on O'Reilly's MacDevCenter, but really, there isn't much to it. You download Apple's X11 and then the latest Darwin version of OpenOffice.org. You run the two installers, and you're almost there. The one problem is, if you use Apple's X11, there's no double clickable launcher for starting OpenOffice. Instead, the article on O'Reilly says to add it to the Application menu in X11, but for some reason, that didn't quite work out either. So at the end, I created a script as /usr/bin/office which contains three lines:

#!/bin/sh
/Applications/OpenOffice.org1.0.3/program/soffice \
    > /dev/null 2>&1 &

Setup the permissions and all I have to do is type office in the xterm window, and OpenOffice starts up.

As for the software it self, well, it works. It works pretty well all things considered, but it nonetheless is a XWindows app. MS Office X used a lot of native OS X technologies, and had a fairly sleek interface, although it did keep much of the irritating Microsoftness too. OpenOffice is free of Miscrosoftness, but it's... well, it has the usability of a UNIX app (which is almost an oxymoron). Now if someone were to create a Cocoa port of OpenOffice, I'd definitely consider paying for a copy... and I'm talking about real money too, maybe even like $15.