I stumbled onto a real gem today. It is called Open Office and it is basically a knock off of MS Office. The download site is OpenOffice and the program is completely free. No strings attached but they do ask for a donation. It is fully compatible with MS Office; it will read any MS Office document and MS Office will read any Open Office document. If you are looking for a cost effective alternative to MS Office, this is a good choice. Or you can pay $400 for MS Office and help keep Bill Gates out of the Poor House.

I have used Open Office for a long time, wife got it for me a long time ago. it really works.

same here works great,

Forget the Evil MS corp. Over priced, less than usable programs.

Open Office is a good program. A fellow I work with gave me a copy. Works great. The way he explained it is, that it is an open-source program, so therefore free to distribute, as long as it is not sold.

The Big Guy across the street said it is prone to virus attacks. Well, I am not a qualified geek but I do deep scan my computer regularly, maintain TWO firewalls, and I have not had a virus in 3 years. Eternal Vigilance!

This Big Guy sez he dos use it to.
i nevr have any problems with it. i dont need to buy tht expensiv microsft office ether. they have enuf of my hard earned dinero

I have been using it for the last 5 years and have had no problems with it at all! Still running Ver. 1.1.0. Wife just got a new laptop for B'day/Christmas and I just installed the latest version (3.0.0) on it for her. What I like about it is that you can save your work in Open Office format, generic format (such as Rich Text Files) or in MS format. It will open MS format files without any problems. This lets you share your work with those that still use MS products. Great product and it's Free! That is if you download it off of the net.

I use it as well but am not as happy with it. I am using a G4 Mac with OSX 10.4. It will save and open different files but I have difficulty with it still being in the same condition as saved. Emailing the files will get jumbled in transmission.

It does have some nice features and capabilities, just doesn't work as well on my Mac. (sigh) and Mac doesn't really have a decent spreadsheet available and Textedit is pretty low end but usable.