yep, educational office is so cheap it is almost insanity not to buy it. however, as mentioned, entourage and powerpoint are just crap and not worth installing, however, excel is a good app. i wouldn't also be too excited about word, because it is too bloated to act as text editor and sucks at real pixel-perfect publishing work. it's only good in opening word files and that's what it's worth.
if you can, stick to appleworks. if you know its word processing capabilities are not enough, you will not be much better with word either. if you really need to publish documents, you will need indesign or such. and with indesign, word is not any more useful than textedit is, and in fact textedit produces much less headaches to indesign workflow than word.
but for compatibility's sake, word is worth installing. for real work, no way. it always comes in the way.
i really hope apple does word killer soon. i wouldn't have difficulties in buying excel from microsoft in the future too, but i'd like to see word die. sooner the better. now that apple has keynote, next logical step is to create such a word processor that puts word to shame. maybe they could buy intellectual property of wordperfect from corel? they are not supporting mac anymore, so maybe they would let apple to develop their software for mac. after all, corel office is competing with microsoft office and that wouldn't be bad for their business
