techblog 

I use a Mac and I also have to deal with Word documents at work, so I have Microsoft Word installed. Until recently it worked without a hitch. In fact I used to joke that it looked better and worked better than Word on Windows. Recently it started behaving rather badly. *Really* badly - not just crashing but bringing down a bunch of other applications with it. I have never seen this behaviour before on OS X. It has been suggested to me that this is down to upgrading the operating system to 10.4.9. But whatever it is, it’s not pretty.

So I have upgraded to NeoOffice 2.1. I have to say it is very nice - since version 2.0 they have made it look much more like a proper Mac application. It does a very good job and copes with the same documents that cause Word to spontaneously combust. I’d suggest giving it a try.