ms office too costly? great free option

The initial poster missed out a small but vital point. Like ms office but free and open source.

OpenOffice Is Excellent, with the exception of impress. Powerpoint is way better.

I've used it, it can't compare with office 2003 though.

My dad got Microsoft Office Professional of Ebay for very cheap...still nice.

I switched several months ago, and will never come back

80Mb against...uhm...how many? I don't remember...but several hundreds - same functionalities :|

OpenOffice is about as good as it gets for the free suites. Beta 2.0 (I believe) is pretty nice and clones MS Office even better.

However when the new version of Office comes out towards the end of the year (I think that is right, Q3 or Q4 maybe?) it is going to blow OpenOffice away. If you havn't seem the demo vids or screen shots of the new MS Office coming out you should check them out, they looks great

Thanks, that is a good Open Source initiative

open office is pretty sweet. I have heard that Microsoft is going to allow for more compatibility between all the major suites soon.

Microsoft it just costy, but Openoffice it pretty good, there is no need to buy MS Office, chances are none of us use all its features anyway