MarinerPak (USD $79.00) 
Website: Mariner Software
MarinerPak is an affordable alternative to Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel for Mac OS 9 and 10. Currently priced at USD$79.95 for the download edition, it offers pretty much everything you would expect from a word processing and spreadsheet suite. However, with competition from the Open Source community, I’m sure most would agree that spending money on an office suite would require some truly compelling features.
Anyone familiar with Microsoft Word should feel right at home in Mariner Write. After about two hours of use, as far as features and usability go, there are not many noticeable differences to disadvantage Mariner Write. Unfortunately, both counterparts of MarinerPak only have partial read/write support for Microsoft Excel and Word documents. This fact does greatly crippling it’s compatibility. How much you will suffer from the partial compatibility depends on the complexity of your documents, but chances are this will be the factor that holds you back from purchasing it.
While lack of full compatibility with Microsoft’s standard is a turn-off, I will not base my review on that factor alone. Unlike it’s free competition MarinerPak software is extremely fast and matches the look and feel of the Mac perfectly. It launches instantaneously on my Mac Mini Core Duo and has not choked on any large Microsoft Word documents I’ve thrown at it. MarinerPak will also barely leave a footprint on your RAM and CPU usage, which is greatly appreciated in any application.
Compatibility with Excel documents is not on par with that of Word documents. Some of my personal files were not fully functional in MarinerCalc, and the application didn’t feel fast in handling large Excel spreadsheets. I am not an Excel master, but I did feel slightly lost using the MarinerCalc interface at times. I have the feeling a more experienced Excel user may be able to adjust to the UI better than someone like myself. However for basic uses, starting a fresh spreadsheet with MarinerCalc is as smooth of a procedure as a text document with MarinerWrite.
MarinerPak is an overall solidly developed software suite that earns it’s $80 dollar price tag in terms of speed and features. But with OpenOffice.org, NeoOffice, and AbiWord available for free it is hard to recommend the suite to most people. Even more so if they wouldn’t mind waiting a few extra seconds for those applications to launch. The best way to describe my feelings towards MarinerPak as a whole would be comparing it to a movie that you really want to love, but the acting or script is so bad you just keep turning it off. Because MarinerPak has such a great foundation I can only hope they continue to fine tune it or make it an addition to the Open Source community.
I’ve used Mariner software before. I am truly impressed by the quality and functionality of their software. I love it and use it regularly instead of Word. Plus functionality beyond your standard software.
I cant really comment on this particular product. Im new to mac and Im not relient on MS Word so for me Apples iWork suite is all I need with a much better user interface. So I’ll stick with iWork.
Would that be easier for us to understand the software better if you could compare M$ Office, Mariner, and Neooffice?
I didn’t get into a lot of detail in the specs comparison because the site has a great comparison chart. Here’s a link: http://www.marinersoftware.com/sitepage.php?page=88
For me the Mariner Software Write and Calc are a glass is half full type of thing.
On its own both pieces of software are pretty good, easy to use and aren’t memory hogs. The interface is very Mac like.
The half empty part is that Calc doesn’t have some of the more advanced features that Excel has (some of the basic database function, which I do need). The other part of the half empty is that compatibility issue (working on something at home in Calc, doesn’t translate well to Excel at work).
After trying pretty much all of these (Mariner Software, OpenOffice, NeoOffice), and as much as I didn’t want to, I had to revert back to M$ and Word/Excel. If they were more compatible, fewer conversion issues between Word and ??? I would get away from Microsoft all together.
Apple are you reading this? (Keynote, Pages, a spreadsheet please)