Everyone needs Microsoft Word, right? If you're creating documents at work, writing term papers or just letters at home, you need to process words.But Word, and especially Office, is so expensive. A quick look at Amazon.com shows a sticker price of a whopping $350. Ouch.
Thankfully you have options. OpenOffice is a free, open source suite of programs that lets you produce the same documents as Microsoft Office.
Writer (
), Impress (
), Math (
), Draw (
), Calc (
) and Base (
) are all included to produce text documents, presentations, mathematical functions, vectored drawings, spreadsheets and databases.OpenOffice can run on Windows, Mac, Linux and a few other OSes, too. One thing to note though Mac users, OpenOffice requires an extra addon that can be a pain to install and run the suite. Luckily though, OpenOffice has a more useful cousin, NeoOffice, which is also free and contains the same programs, but is native to Mac OS X.
There are a other Microsoft Office alternatives, but none with as nice of a price as OpenOffice/NeoOffice.
