Whenever I get a word processing document, I don’t have to look at the file extension or icon to know it’s probably in Word, or translated into that ubiquitous format in another application. A spreadsheet? Excel, of course, although things might be a little hazier with a presentation, since Apple’s Keynote does so many good things so well.

So it’s fair to say that the various components of Microsoft Office are as critical and common on the Mac as on Windows. In fact, many suggest that few would take a Mac seriously as a business computer without Office being regularly developed for the platform.

Certainly, Microsoft’s Mac Business Unit has been working seriously on the software for years. Sure, it’s been a while since a major release appeared, but there’s that little matter of making a Universal version, which meant bring millions of lines of code into a new development environment. Sprawling software requires sprawling efforts to move the lumbering beast forward.

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Dear Friend,

I know that, like all folks who have embraced the Apple Macintosh, you are an extremely smart, well-educated person with an above-average income. Or at least you aspire to one or all of these goals. Despite being surrounded by people who have urged you to join the “Dark Side,” which is our little moniker for the Windows world, you have resisted.

You have also been asked to consider Mac OS X. All right, I understand that it’s very, very different, and not just the stuff that’s happening under-the-hood. Despite its superficial resemblance to the Classic Mac OS, things have changed, sometimes drastically. You can’t customize the Apple menu without the help of a third party utility, control panels have been replaced by System Preferences, and there’s no Chooser.

Worse, you no longer have to cope with the quirks of a single Fonts folder, but several, for the single user, for all users, the network and even specific applications. For years, you coped with with PostScript and TrueType fonts, not to mention the original bitmap faces, and now you will have to deal with OpenType and something with the file extension .dfont.

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