OpenOffice is widely considered to be the best free alternative to Microsoft Office - the package includes a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation manager, database, and drawing program. It’s compatible with a wide range of file formats so you’ll easily be able to work with documents from MS Office users. The interface is simple and easy to get to grips with - if you’ve used any other office suite, you should have no difficulty at all finding your way around OpenOffice applications, and if you get stuck you’ll find there’s a comprehensive help facility and great support available on the project’s web-site.
OpenOffice is based on StarOffice, a commercial office suite owned by Sun Microsystems. The company decided that the best way to compete with Microsoft’s dominance in this area was to make the product open source and, essentially, give it away for free - Sun makes money out of this arrangement by charging its corporate customers for tech support and product customisation. For the rest of us, it just means that we get a professional quality office suite completely free of charge.
You can download your copy of OpenOffice (for Windows, Mac, or Linux) from: http://download.openoffice.org