[fryke]

If you send a resume to somebody and don't know whether he uses a version of Word (or whatever) that displays your resume (or whatever) exactly the way you want it to be: Use PDF. In Mac OS X you can save as PDF any document you create. Just go to the print dialog and hit 'Preview'. You can then save that preview as a PDF file that shows *the same* wherever you send it to (unless they read it on a Palm or Win CE thingie, but then they know...)

If you need to *receive* Office files, right now your only chance is that it might open fine in AppleWorks. Well, it won't. It will have display problems for certain features and line-/pagebreaks will definitely not look the same as intended.

If you don't care about that, AppleWorks is fine, else right now you need Office.

But SEND your stuff using PDF.