And get Office for Mac 2008:
http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/20...oft-previ.html
http://www.macoffice2008.com
Well, I'm one of the fortunate ones to have the school give me Office 2004 for free, so I take that. As for others who don't, there is the option of Parallels, but there is also iWork (which contains Pages (Word replacement), Numbers (Excel replacement), and Keynote (PowerPoint replacement). It's $71 for students, but I have heard that some people are a little lukewarm toward Numbers. I don't know how that would affect most students.
Of course, if you don't want either, there's OpenOffice.org (although on Macs, I would go with the Aqua-native version NeoOffice rather than run OpenOffice.org through X11).
And get Office for Mac 2008:
http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/20...oft-previ.html
http://www.macoffice2008.com
My worry about the new Office suites coming out is the .docx format, which seems to be an attempt to slam the marketplace into a single Microsoft proprietary format that would render OpenOffice.org, iWork, and the smaller open-source projects (like AbiWord) inoperable. Unless, of course, these programs are able to reverse-engineer the codes.
Of course, when Office 2008 comes out, I'll probably be waiting for the Pitt technology office to get its first shipment in, although experience should really teach me to put that on hold until the bugs are worked out. Probably ditto for when it receives Leopard as well.