Mountain Lion eliminated my MS Word program. I can't find a replacement in my computer. Any suggestions?

MS Office 2011 runs under ML. Download at microsoft.com/mac

Also OpenOffice an LibreOffice are free downloads that come close to but not fully replacing MS-proper.

When you say "eliminated" do you mean it's completely gone, or just missing from your dock?

Try clicking on Spotlight search in the upper right corner, and type "Word" to see if it appears there.

erict43 has a point, and I may have spoken too soon.

Sme have reported that applications NOT loaded into the generic "applications" folder seem to vanish under ML because ML looks for them there.

Then you do need MS Office 2011 or the free options.

Look at this for other applications not supported by ML: http://roaringapps.com/apps:table

I see, didn't realize you were using 2004.

2004 needs Rosetta to run in Snow Leopard, and my understanding is that Rosetta support went away in Lion. So, I might guess that you upgraded from Snow Leopard to Mountain Lion, am I right?

In this case there is nothing you can do, except get a newer version of Microsoft Office, or go back to Snow Leopard. Office 2011 works find with ML, I use it myself.

Yes, Pages would certainly work. You might also want to check out Open Office.

http://www.openoffice.org/download/index.html

You may also want to try Libre Office. Its free and open source. It is quite similar to MS Office but more versitile.

http://www.libreoffice.org/

There is a hitch with OpenOffice and LibreOffice, from personal experience.

I had a document created in MS Office, using bullet points that were just small circles.

I opened it in OpenOffice and the smll circles were now small three-pointed stars.

The common functionality of features in older formats (pre-"x" series documents and spreadsheets ... ".xlsx" and ".docx") is good, but the free variants must try to keep up and it depends on where in mid-cycle you download the free versions.

Not to say you should not use them, but be warned of some hidden issues.

Depending upon how extensive your library of legacy Microsoft Office data files are, you may want to consider continuing to use Microsoft Office 2004 in addition to upgrading to Office 2011.

Microsoft Office's 2011 version is compatible with Lion and presumably either works with Mountain Lion or an update will make it so. The problem with this approach is that Office 2011 will "convert" your earlier data files and there lies the rub! For example, I have the need to weekly open a chart created in Excel 2004, but Excel 2011 trashes the chart in its "conversion."

So I have approached the overall problem differently.

The reason your applications do not work in Mountain Lion is that they were written for the older PowerPC CPU that all Macs used up to 2006. When Apple made its transition to the Intel CPU, they licensed software that they included in all versions of OS X (from Tiger to Leopard and optionally, Snow Leopard) called Rosetta.

Rosetta miraculously allows PowerPC applications to work on the Intel processor transparently; you do not know it is even present.

The problem is that after 6 years of the transition, Apple's license to use the underlying software expired for OS X Lion and all version thereafter (and it is doubtful that the current owner of the software, IBM, would relicense it, even if Apple were inclined to do so).

So for those of use that need to run Lion, I have offered the option to install Snow Leopard (with Rosetta) into Parallels 7:

[click on images to enlarge]

And now Mountain Lion:

Full Snow Leopard installation instructions into Parallels 7 are here:

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1365439

Parallels offers a 14 day free trial of Parallels 7 on their website:

http://www.parallels.com/download/desktop/