Microsoft Office has reigned for years as the dominant suite of applications for business and personal use, all for a $400-plus chunk of change. There have been some attempts at alternatives -- including, in 2001, OpenOffice, a free open-source alternative that captured the essence of Office for PC users -- but not so much for the friends of Steve Jobs.

While OpenOffice can run on Mac OS X, thanks to Apple's X Window System (also known as X11), X-based applications weren't able to keep the polish on the Apple: OpenOffice for the Macintosh lacks the look of the Aqua user interface, doesn't have command-key shortcuts, and has problems supporting Macintosh fonts.

Enter NeoOffice 2.1, a straight conversion of OpenOffice to the Apple platform and the best office suite money can't buy.

NeoOffice Draw is one of the applications offered in this free office suite for the Mac. (Click image to enlarge.)

NeoOffice is a great substitute for Microsoft Office. In fact, in some ways, it improves on the original. Unlike Microsoft Office, where each application installs its own icon to the dock, NeoOffice presents itself as a single application, from which you can start any of the five modules, Writer (Word); Calc (Excel); Impress (PowerPoint); Base (Access); and a separate drawing tool, Draw.

At first, using NeoOffice after being immersed in Microsoft Office is like trying to communicate with someone in Portuguese when you only speak Spanish -- un poco dificil. However, this minor confusion works itself out quickly. I was able to help the situation somewhat by opting for NeoOffice's "Industrial" look, which you can find under Preferences -->View, for the best blend of Aqua-look with Office-feel.

The suite is filled with nice touches. For example, a "compass" icon in the standard toolbar brings up a separate navigator palette. This navigator, which is much more powerful than Word's Outline view, allows for quick access to all the structural elements of the document, including headings, footnotes, tables, graphics, and embedded objects. NeoOffice also integrates perfectly with the Spotlight search engine for indexing documents.

The interface works intelligently and well. For example, if you're working on a Writer file, hitting command-N for a new document will automatically bring up a new Writer page. The Help document similarly recognizes the program you're currently working on and brings up the Help for that program. (If you want to open a new program, you can find it under the NeoOffice menu.)

And speaking of Help, NeoOffice comes with a comprehensive and comprehensible help system that is based on OpenOffice's. For getting assistance with built-in features, I found it very useful. But for some activities, its OpenOffice roots show through: When I sought help with exporting PDFs, NeoOffice had help text about its built-in PDF export option and about installing fonts into Mac OS X Server, which applies to OpenOffice. However, there's no mention that in NeoOffice you can "print" to a PDF file through the printer dialog, just like any native Mac OS X application.