http://www.neooffice.org/

Open Office (OO) is a free and open source "productivity" suite which mirrors the capabilities of Microsoft Office.  NeoOffice reads and writes MS Word, Excel, and dozens (hundreds?) of other (obscure?) file types. (I thought I'd run into a problem, as this menu took quite a few secs to populate, and the program was unresponsive in the interim. However, it's a hell of a list!)

 

The most recent versions will inter-operate with Microsoft's new "open standard" Office XML formats, providing even better compatibility into the future.

I've been using NeoOffice for the past year and recently switched over to NeoOffice Writer for all of my word processing.
It's highly sophisticated, offering at least 80-90% of the features that MS Word does, and easily 100% of the features that any normal Word user would need day-to-day. For users of OS X on Intel Macs, the speed improvements over Word (which is still not Intel native) are remarkable.

 


Here's the "Excel" application, NeoOffice Calc

 

NeoOffice gets ***** five stars for being an excellent alternative to the overpriced Microsoft Office Suite.
While I give the Microsoft Mac products division credit for vastly improving the Mac version of Office over the past couple of years, it's very likely that Microsoft will phase out Word for the Mac in the future.
NeoOffice provides an excellent migration path for Mac users with lots of Word or Excel documents, or with a need to share these with Windows Office users.

http://www.planamesa.com/neojava/en/download.php

"""
NeoOffice 2.0 Aqua Beta 3 is a test release and may have some undiscovered bugs that may cause NeoOffice to crash. If you feel that you need software that has been heavily tested, we recommend that you use a commercially-supported product like Microsoft Office.
Since NeoOffice is developed by volunteers and tested by users, we expect that users will find crashing or other serious bugs. We strongly recommend that you save your work frequently so that if you encounter a crashing bug, you will not lose much data.
"""

Ha. Like Microsoft doesn't crash ;-)
I've found the latest release to be incredibly stable. (although if you select that "open as" menu shown above, it may take a minute to show up...)

have fun!

PF