Up until fairly recently, Microsoft Office was the primary choice for anyone
who wanted to purchase an office suite. Office is about as compatible as you can
get, as other suites attempt to match compatibility so they can read and write
from Microsoft Office documents. This is essential for any competitive office
suites from integrating within the office environment.
Not only are there a range of competitive commercial office suites, such as
Sun Star Office, Ashampoo Office and Ability Office, there are free equivalents,
such as Open Office and the most recent release from IBM, Lotus Symphony.
Lotus Symphony ships with three modules: Documents, Presentations and
Spreadsheets, which means you’ll be able to write documents, produce
presentations and calculate your basic finances. Although Symphony supports and
pro-actively encourages you to use the new Open Document Format (ODF), all
modules enable you to read and write to Microsoft Office documents.
The user-interface is based on the native Apple 'Aqua' and is the first
release for the Mac OS.