OpenOffice

OpenOffice is not perfect. (No software is.) While it will create and open MOST MS Office documents, the compatibility is NOT 100%, and some Word formatting and Excel formulas can be inoperable. The interface is clean and attractive, but there are some areas where it's not the most intuitive. The PowerPoint equivalent ("Impress") is pretty rudimentary, as is the database app in the latest beta release, and there is no email client or Outlook equivalent.

HOWEVER... What do you expect for free? I certainly didn't expect OpenOffice to be as useful or as stable as it is. Since I already have valid copies of MS Office Pro and MS Works, I probably won't abandon them for OpenOffice. If I did not already own them, I can certainly imagine getting along quite nicely with OpenOffice, and recommend that anyone needing an office software suite check it out before spending money on anything else.

I was WAY skeptical, a free program that is not only MS Office, Word compatible it actually does ALL that it says! I know the prog is big and a bit slow to load-BUT WHO CARES! You can write and read WORD and it doesn't SPY ON YOU! I have not missed MS ONCE, I'll never go back. AMAZING!

A co-worker of mine loves to hate Microsoft, uses Linux, and won't shut up about OpenOffice. That was almost enough to make me NOT try it, but I'm on a severely limited budget, and I needed an office suite that would let me share Word and Excel docs.

Well, it turns out that dude was right. Open Office does everything I need it to do, it's stable, and it didn't cost me a dime. I had originally thought I'd use it just until I could save some bucks for a new copy of MS Office, but OpenOffice is good enough that now I'm in no hurry to go back to using MS Office... if I do at all.

The only downside is that now I have to admit to that bozo at work that he was right.