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I’m especially interested in features that make it easy for the average teacher to crank out documents, presentations, web content, and multimedia.

We can all use Word (or, at least, most teachers can) and PowerPoint is fairly straightforward as well. As we slowly migrated schoolwide to Office 2007, many teachers began using OpenOffice, both for a familiar look and feel to the Office 2000 they left behind and for compatibility with the majority of students who use the free suite.

On the Mac, we now have Office 2008 (which, at first glance, is a bit less intimidating to users of earlier versions of Office than Office 2007); NeoOffice (a port of OpenOffice fully integrated into OS X); OpenOffice itself, which runs in OS X’s X11 windowing environment; and Apple’s iWork suite. Choices, choices, choices! Click here for a gallery of their most interesting features and interface particulars. Read on for a teacher’s perspective on ease of use and productivity in each.

To test these suites, I completed a number of simple, day-to-day, teaching tasks in each.

* To evaluate Word and its moral equivalents, I created a worksheet to lead one of my classes through an activity in Geometer’s Sketchpad.
* For Excel and its ilk, I created a spreadsheet to track book numbers and generate a pie chart of book conditions
* For PowerPoint, et al, I shot a few video clips giving directions for an activity and created a presentation around the video.

It should be noted that the latest version of OpenOffice (2.3.1) is unavailable currently for OS X. OpenOffice for X11 (essentially a port of the *nix versions of the suite) is up to version 2.3. NeoOffice is at version 2.2.3 (2.2.2 was evaluated here). Functionally, this has little impact; Sun has also thrown considerable effort lately into improving support for the Mac platform.