Mac users generally have a mixed relationship with Microsoft these days. The days of militant adversarial advocacy between Mac users and Windows users are over, of course; bitter flame wars and sundered friendships across platform lines have been replaced with an attitude of general coexistence. Windows users admire the Mac for its elegance and simplicity, Mac users admire the Windows PC for its incredible software selection. One thing, however, hasn't changed: Microsoft makes some pretty inefficient, bloated software. While Microsoft software has found its way into virtually every Macintosh out there, there's no reason you should use it more than you absolutely have to. Read on for a few tips on how to minimize your Microsoft dependence.

Replacing Internet Explorer is probably the easiest of the lot; after all, any recent Mac comes with Apple's own alternative browser, Safari, pre-installed for your convenience. The advantages of Safari over IE are pretty clear: it's smaller, its interface is cleaner and more space-economic, and it supports features that are rapidly becoming standard in other web browsers—tabbed browsing, which lets you rapidly navigate between multiple pages in one window, as well as other amenities like Snapback and a built-in pop-up blocker. If that's still not alternative enough for you, the masses are gradually coming to appreciate Mozilla's Firefox, an open source web browser that grew from the now-defunct Netscape Navigator and retains many of the same features as Safari. Both Safari and Firefox will migrate your IE bookmarks over automatically to minimize hassle. Unfortunately, IE users make up the vast majority of the Internet, meaning that websites are inevitably designed to IE standards rather than the official HTML standard, so you'll have to keep a copy of IE on your Mac just for those sites that are a little bit behind the times.

Likewise, getting rid of Windows Media Player is nowhere near as difficult for Mac users as it could be for Windows PC victims. While they rely on WMP to play every single media file on their computer, we only need to use it for the playback of .wmv and .asf files, and considering the Mac version is almost inevitably a few versions behind the Windows version, we don't even need to use it that much at all. (This, I personally take as a good thing, because the .wmv format just feels awkward and clunky to me anyway.) Perhaps the best alternative media player out there is VideoLAN Client, a jack-of-all-trades media player that can handle pretty much whatever you throw at it without needing separate codecs. It's so compatible, in fact, that I find myself using it to play everything back, not just .wmv files, especially considering QuickTime 7 inexplicably runs terribly on my computer. Virtually anything I've thrown at it—.mpg, .avi, .asf, .wmv, whatever—has played back more smoothly with less graphical artifacts and glitches than any other media player I've tried. Grab it even if you're not looking for an alternative to anything. You'll be surprised by how well it works.

All of this is child's play compared to getting rid of the mother of all MS apps: Microsoft Office. Office is what maintains Microsoft's prevalence in the business world, and despite its generally bloated application design, it is still considered the standard when it comes to word processing. And when it comes to getting work done, you'll generally want to play it safe.

Let's begin with the most widely used of the MS Office suite: Microsoft Word. If all you use in the Office suite is Word, swapping it out may be easier than you think. Apple's own TextEdit has come a long way from its SimpleText roots; not only can it handle indentation, spacing, styles, and spellcheck via OS X's built-in text features, but it can read MS Word documents and Unicode documents as well as the Rich Text Format (.rtf) and plain text documents (.txt) that you're used to. .RTF can be read by any major text editor, and although certain .RTF documents can come out a little funky in MS Word, it has the advantage of staying fairly consistent across the years, unlike MS Word's .DOC format, meaning you can be fairly assured that old documents will remain intact. If you think you're above using TextEdit for your word processing needs, you still might want to give it a shot (it's worth noting, perhaps, that I use TextEdit almost exclusively for all my school documents and all my Applelinks articles). Should you feel a bit more adventurous, go ahead and give Mariner Write a shot. It's a venerable alternative Mac word processor that's been out since the OS 8 days or so, and it's survived the transition to OS X in a healthy state. It's also a little more full-featured than TextEdit, and it works in .rtf format by default, so you get full compatibility with pretty much any word processor out there.

If replacing Word still isn't enough for you, you'll have to look for full-fledged office suites to fulfill your needs. Once again, the most convenient solution probably already resides on your computer: AppleWorks is a venerable but reliable office suite that can handle word processing, spreadsheets, basic databases, and presentations (it also has vector-based drawing and pixel-based painting functions, in case you feel like doodling!). While it hasn't been updated in a while, it's still very much a viable word processor, and it can import and export to several different file formats, including various incarnations of .DOC files, courtesy of MacLinkPlus. Unfortunately, rendering text in AppleWorks can look butt ugly, especially now that we're used to anti-aliased text everywhere else in OS X, and for many professional environments, AppleWorks just might not cut it. Enter NeoOffice/J, an open source alternative to MS Office like StarOffice or OpenOffice but one that needs no extra developer tools or frameworks to run; just install it and it works. While it is significantly slower to start up than AppleWorks and can feel sluggish at first, it's a fairly efficient application that does a good job replicating the look and feel of MS Office without all the bloat. As far as I can tell, it's also very good at creating .doc files that work splendidly with PC and Mac versions of MS Word, and it also has a drawing mode, a presentation mode, and a spreadsheet mode to round out its set of office functions.

It's worth pointing out that none of the applications listed here did a perfect job of reading MS Word documents. Thanks to differences in the text rendering systems, a fourteen-page MS Word document would open in NeoOffice/J as a fourteen-page-and-one-sentence-document, a fifteen-page TextEdit document, a sixteen-page Mariner Write document, and an eighteen-page (!) AppleWorks document. Out of all the applications that Microsoft makes, MS Office is probably the hardest to replace, especially for those with a professional investment in the application, but giving contenders like AppleWorks and NeoOffice/J a chance could potentially change your office habits for the better (and saving cash on shelling out for Office upgrades is always better!) so give them a shot.

These aren't all the Microsoft apps out there, to be sure. No one does MSN Messenger as well as MS does, and apps like Entourage are usually so specific to individual circumstances that anyone who uses them would probably just be using Mail, iCal and Address Book if they could. No matter which MS apps you're using, though, take some time to explore the alternatives. It is rare indeed that Microsoft is actually the best in any software arena, so experiment with what's out. You'll be glad you did.

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