One of my daughter's has a Mac and it has a neat feature that allows her to switch languages for her keyboard so she can type in Spanish in openoffice. When she switches to Spanish, a nice keyboard map appears on the screen so she can see where the special characters are located (i.e. the n-tilde is right next to the L key). This does not switch all the menus etc to Spanish. It just switches the keyboard to a Spanish keyboard. The display of the Spanish keyboard on the screen is really important.