I too am a long-time WordPerfect user. Having had to use MS Word at work, I can honestly say that I prefer the way Word does a few things, but overall I still prefer WordPerfect to Word on everything else. OpenOffice just isn't quite "there" yet for me.

I too am disappointed that Pages '08 doesn't support ODF or WPD formats.

Since I am loathe to abandon or convert all my legacy WordPerfect files, my kludgy work-around is to use WordPerfect via Windows 98SE running under Parallels.

It would be great if Corel would re-examine its Mac and Linux strategies. I'd think that a lot of porting groundwork would have already been done simply by virtue of the existence of WordPerfect 8.0 for Linux and Corel Office for Java. It is telling that when Corel announced WordPerfect Lightning, there was a substantial clamor for them to offer a Mac version.

It would be nice if the next release of WordPerfect (WP14 ?) supported ODF. Then with my kludge of Parallels > Windows > WordPerfect, I could at least use the latest version of WordPerfect. I haven't upgraded to WP X3 because I sense that the next version's release is fairly imminent. Perhaps Corel is waiting until Vista SP1 is released before coming out with WP 14. This would also get them some time to polish their Open XML filters/converters.

If you're going to use Parallels, and you are in the market for a new printer, make sure to get one with a built-in network connection (10/100baseT) instead-of/in-addition-to a USB connection. Printing via USB under Parallels is spotty. Printing via Bonjour is slightly better, but Bonjour requires at least Windows 2000. The best solution is to hang your printer off the network rather than having it attached directly to the computer via USB; there are too many sharing/device-availability issues with USB & Parallels.

To Dan and cafemeio:

Thank you both for your suggestions.

I've used MacLinkPlus in the past, but if Neo Office will open these files...I'm assuming I'll be able save them to either Word or Pages '08...then I'll go that route, as it's obviously time I finally switched from WP.

Thanks to all.