For many other reasons I use Neo Office instead of Microsoft Office. It's a free open source suite of programs from Sun Microsystems that does everything Office can and more. It reads and writes all the office file formats including the older ones from a time when Mac PowerPoint files were not compatible with PC PowerPoint files.... You get the idea. But one feature I rarely see mentioned is the extremely robust PDF export. So you can open a native .doc file (maintaining all the Microsoft formatting) and then export as a PDF with complete security, font, compression, and versioning control, none of which the generic printer PDF export does. The latest port is always at neooffice.org
So you can view .doc files from Mac users, even if the format is not supported by your Mac. You can export to PDF in the latest version of Office (5) and you can export older versions of the Office program if you don't mind the older file formats. You can also export your .doc files to the PDF format provided you create a free Adobe Acrobat PDF. But there's another feature even better that is very handy for those of you who have a Windows Mac. It's called “PowerPoint on Windows” and it takes your existing PowerPoint presentation and exports it as PDF using Microsoft Office. This is so easy you don't need to use the PDF viewer or the free Adobe Acrobat Reader (or the PDF converter if you're on your Macintosh). This is the easiest way for a professional Microsoft Office user looking to export their Microsoft Office documents from.