If you’re just a basic user, and don’t use fancy features and formatting in Word, you might be a good candidate to use OpenOffice or AbiWord.
OpenOffice is open-source software (bunch of guys getting together via the internet and developing free software out of goodwill). It comes with the following applications:
-Writer (like Word)
-Calc (like Excel)
-Impress (like Powerpoint)
-Draw (a drawing program)
-Base (a database program)
I’ve only personally tried Writer, and I found it to be quite good. It’s matured over the years, and it’s pretty stable now. You can get more info about it and download it yourself:
Another good, mature open-source Word like application is AbiWord. It only has a word processing program (unlike the full suite given in OpenOffice).
It looks almost exactly like Word, and it seems quite good as well. If you are planning to use a document switching from Word to OpenOffice or AbiWord, I recommend that you watch out for formatting changes, as they might not talk to each other well.
But like I said, if you’re just writing normal letters or essays and such, you will be ok with these free alternative solutions.
They are available for Window, Mac or Linux.
Save yourself some cash and go treat your family/friends out to dinner!
Thanks for using AbiWord! If you find any bugs, please report any problems to http://bugzilla.abisource.com
–Ryan, AbiWord Dev and Win32 Maintainer
AbiWord Community Outreach Project: http://cleardefinition.com/oss/abi/blog/
sure, will do. AbiWord seems to have much potential.
[...] A ha! This blog has a good idea for what you can do with the money you save (and time, of course, but they didn’t mention that) using AbiWord instead of MS Office. They also mentioned OO.o, but that negates the bonus time thing… http://basictech.wordpress.com/2006/07/19/dont-wanna-spend-bucks-for-ms-office-try-openoffice-or-abiword-free/ [...]