The Microsoft Office suite is a very capable package that many of us have become accustomed to, but there's no getting away from the fact it's expensive. Although the applications within the suite are very able, many of the features that ship with programs like Word are hardly or never needed by the average user. There are now a number of open-source word processing applications now available that enable you to create documents and save them as a Word document (.doc).

OpenOffice 3 is a very able open-source alternative to Microsoft Office that ships with a spreadsheet tool, word processor and a presentation application as well as other utilities. It's cross platform and compatible with Microsoft Office formats, so you can open, edit and save documents with ease. The latest version 3 is now fully Mac compatible using the Aqua interface.

OpenOffice 3 link.

15 Oct 2008