I'm literate, so do I need to pay $450 to read an essay?

Do I really have to pay for Microsoft Office? No. Most people have a casual relationship with MS Word or Excel: they receive a word document every once and while, or sum some numbers in Excel. So what justifies forking over $450 dollars for an office suite that allows me to open an essay? While there are some features that are only for MS Office, there are several good OpenSource alternatives that will do all of the common tasks of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, and more.

OpenOffice (www.openoffice.org) is the most common alternative. It runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X using X11, and it writes most file formats that are used in MS Office. It's look and feel are mirrored after MS Office, so it provides for an easy transition from MS Office. With a dedicated base of users and developers, OpenOffice will continue to grow and improve. Download from OpenOffice for free, size about 120MB. For Mac OS X users check out NeoOffice. It is a port of OpenOffice that integrates with OS X's Aqua UI. It has some release lag, but is a good option if you are looking for the traditional Mac appearance and installed fonts and printers.

ThinkFree Office is an online based Office suite. It contains about 50 -60% of the features that MS Office has, but it contains everything you would use daily and is compatible with almost every MS Office file format. What distinguishes ThinkFree from OpenOffice is that it's online, and almost as fully featured as OO. After creating a ThinkFree account, you are able to run each program as an applet in your browser. This enables a user to run ThinkFree from any computer with an Internet connection and a Web Browser. A great bonus to ThinkFree is the online storage; a user is able to access their documents from any computer or share their documents with other ThinkFree users. Registration is required, but free. ThinkFree also has a proprietary version that can be purchased, installed, and run like a regular Office Suite. ThinkFree, http://www.thinkfree.com/

Google Docs is much less featured than OO or ThinkFree, but it provides a quick way to view and edit simple Word and Excel documents. If you have a Google account just click docs and spreadsheets to get started.

There are several other options available, but these are my favorite and the easiest to use if you're switching from MS Office.