Open Office from Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Open Office 2.4

Open Office consists of Writer, Impress, Calc, Math, Draw, and Base. The programs are all free for the download. The programs appear to interact with like Microsoft programs. My Word documents come up in Writer and I can manipulate them as if in the Word. This seems to hold true for all the Open Office products. You can also setup Open Office so that it will automatically act as the preferred software for the respective files.

I had a bit of a problem installing the suite from the web site. I successfully saved the install file - then did a full install. I had no further problems. The full install took less than 30 minutes. I did notice that in Impress a rather complicated PowerPoint would run except for an embedded Breeze Presentation. The audio was there, just not the video. This may need a plug-in for the Breeze to work properly.

Bottom line: The Open Office is free. Open Office appears to work as well or better than my Office 2003. If you have Student-Learners that can not afford MS Office - this is a definite alternative.