My Kingdom for a Decent Office Suite

After spending some time experimenting with a couple of alternatives to Microsoft Office, I'm afraid none seem to meet my needs. On the Mac, the situation is dire; MS Office always crashes. Always has, no matter what version of OS X I've ever used. (Office X has hated the entire line of "cats" since Day One.) I once made the mistake of downloading the upgrade to Office; after that, none of the programs would even launch at all. Word on the Mac is fine if I save every five seconds, and never add images or cut and paste anything. Excel is less cranky and I can even be productive in it, although lacks some of the math skills of the PC version. (The Mac version inexplicably refuses to let me paste both cell values and number formats at the same time, which annoys me to no end. Oh, and since upgrading to OS 10.4, the Ctrl-click contextual menu items don't work anymore.) To add insult to injury, charts created in Excel for the Mac are not 100% compatible with Excel for the PC and vice versa, which makes collaboration a problem. Same deal with charts pasted into Word. It was this problem that led me to buy a PC in the first place.

So I avoid Word on the Mac.

I was a little excited when Apple released its own Pages word processing application. It handles graphics very well, exports to Word format reasonably OK, but lacks auto caption numbering, caption field updating, and cross-referencing, which are very important to what I usually use a WP program for. But for simple, text-only things, like fiction or text destined for a real page layout program like InDesign, Pages works fine.

I tried a free word processing application called AbiWord. Biggest problem: it does not allow me to paste charts from Excel, nor does it give me the ability (as far as I can tell) to create charts and graphs from within it. So AbiWord is outta here.

Finally, OpenOffice. I have not tried the Mac version yet (though I downloaded it), but I have been playing occasionally with the PC version. Y'know, the same things that annoy me about Word annoy me about OpenOffice: style sheets work as flakily, and it even has the same irritating habit of slipping into Overstrike mode at random, which is the bane of my existence. There is a spreadsheet application which is more user-hostile than Excel, and it does a worse job of formatting charts and graphs. (Am I the only one who ever wants to format y-axis labels on bar graphs? Oh, and OpenOffice doesn't seem to know the difference between an x-axis--which it thinks is the vertical one--and a y-axis--which it thinks is the horizontal one.) And although you can paste charts into the Writer application (a la Word), it is extremely limited in how captions can be added--which is a dealbreaker for me. It has cross-referencing, but it's extremely complex and impenetrable. And figuring out how to create a ToC automastically requires a degree in advanced hyperbolic topology. (It look less time to learn Photoshop.) The only advantage to OpenOffice I've yet encountered is that it is really easy to export to PDF. It's just getting to the point where there is anything to export that's the problem... (I can think of one person who is going to take issue with my assessment of OpenOffice!)

Dare I experiment with another for-pay office suite--like StarOffice or WordPerfect? Perhaps...

Then again, maybe my entire workflow has just adapted to MS Office over the years and I get frustrated by trying to replicate the experience elsewhere. Don't know.

If anyone knows of a decent application that will let me create charts and graphs from Excel data and give me extensive typographic control over axis and data labels, and will let me export them to a vector format like EPS, I would be most appreciative. I use Adobe Illustrator and its Chart Creator for my high-end chart work, but it requires so many workarounds that it can be a production bottleneck. A combination of Excel and Illustrator would be perfect!