I switched to Sun OpenOffice a few years ago. I am VERY glad that I did.
It's serving me well and today I hit the 127,000 words mark in my book. (About 328 pages, including alphabetical index, 340 citations, plus footnotes. I have done many very large multi-page spreadsheets with it (electrical engineering). And the charts (graphs) in OpenOffice 'calc' are faster, easier, and simpler to use than in excel.
OpenOffice beats the heck out of Excel, ms word, it has a database, does great 'powerpoint' presentations, exports in .pdf, and of course does simple HTML webpages also.
Engineers please take note... for years I fought microsoft products - they refuse to let us write in correct I.S.O. units... microsoft won't let me type kHz, MHz, mS, pFd, nFd, nH, mW, mV, kVA, kVAr, etc. OpenOffice lets me, and even lets me enter those in the spell checker.
You may be aware that there are people in this world that are so enthusiastic & passionate about Apple/Mcintosh computers that they border on being annoying. Well... that's how I am with Sun OpenOffice.org !
It is free and it is fantastic. So please switch to OpenOffice.org before I cross the border from 'almost annoyingly passionate' to 'please shut him up'.