Options for Office Suites for PowerPC Macintosh running 10.4 to 10.5

If you recently acquired an older PowerPC Macintosh, you may ask what are your options for an office suite? You know, a word processor, a spreadsheet, and a presentation program.

You have three options:

First, you probably have the Appleworks program on the computer or on the installation disks that should have come with the system. If you didn’t get them, go back and harass whomever gave you the computer for them.

Apple has discontinued Appleworks in favor of the iWorks suite. iWork is available on the Mac App Store. The Mac App Store needs OS X 10.6 and that’s only available on an Intel Mac.

Appleworks is still a good suite. If you want a book, The Missing Manual series has a book on Appleworks 6. It’s available from Amazon.

Second, you could get Microsoft Office 2004 or 2008. By yourself, you could go to eBay or Craigslist to look around.

Or you could come to a user group meeting, such as Macvalley’s June 6th, and ask if anyone has an old copy of Office 2004 for sale or barter. (Yes, I do. Send me an e-mail)

Finally, if you want something that won’t cost you anything, try LibreOffice 3.5.3 for PPC here or NeoOffice 3.1.2 here.

These two programs trace their roots back to the OpenOffice.org project, which DOES NOT offer a PowerPC version. At least not of recent vintage.