How to Cut Microsoft Office Loose and Never Miss it! Option 3

Option Number 3: OpenOffice

OpenOffice.org 3 is the leading open-source office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It is available in many languages and works on all common computers. It stores all your data in an international open standard format and can also read and write files from other common office software packages. It can be downloaded and used completely free of charge for any purpose. 

It is basically Office created for free on Mac or PC with 100% compatibility by a team of programmers sick of Microsoft. Pros: Free, powerful, for PC and Mac new and old; Cons: None

How to Cut Microsoft Office Loose and Never Miss it! Option 2

Option Number 2: Apple iWorks; Pages

Pages is the successor to the word processing portion of Apple's multipurpose office suite, AppleWorks, which was discontinued in August 2007. 

Pages is a word processor and page layout application developed by Apple. It is part of the iWork productivity suite and runs on the Mac OS X operating system. The first version of Pages was announced on January 11, 2005 and was released one month later. The most recent Macintosh version, Pages 4, was released on January 6, 2009 as a component of iWork '09. On January 27, 2010, Apple announced a new version of Pages for iPad with an all new touch interface.

Pages is marketed by Apple as an easy-to-use application that allows users to quickly create professional-quality documents on their home computer.  A number of Apple-designed templates comprising different themes (such as letters, résumés, posters, and outlines), are included with Pages.  Among Microsoft Office applications, it competes with both Microsoft Word and Microsoft Publisher, and has compatibility with both. 100% compatible between Macs and PCs.

Pros: Apple product, stable, full featured; Cons: requires purchase