For those that weren't aware...  I had a wreck.  Luckily it wasn't a garage toy... it was my computer.  Hard drive crashed... data and programs lost. 

I still have a valid license for MS Office Professional 2003, but they are such a pain in the butt... and there are a couple of generations since my version of Office was new.  So, I was faced with a few choices. 

• Hang out on the phone convincing Microsoft that I needed a new User Key...
• Buy an upgrade of Office for a few hundred bucks...
• Wait until the new version comes out.  There are rumors Office 2010 might be out of Beta before long...
• Make a radical change... 
  

Well, CHANGE is in the air, right? 

I decided to try out OpenOffice.  In effect it is an Open Source office suite.  This isn't a bunch of college students  hacking together asecond rate copy...  This is sponsored by Sun Microsystems, Google and IBM.  And it's FREE.

Here is an idea of what it includes:

• Writer - Word Processing (Word)
  
• Calc - Spreadsheet (Excel)
  
• Impress - Presentation (PowerPoint)
• Draw - Sketching (Paint)
• Base - Database (Access)

There are also charting and formula applications that live in Calc.  What it doesn't have is a direct stand alone application like MS Publisher.  However, there are options like Scribus which offer all of the features... albeit, without the integration of a specific suite. 

But... the rest of the package IS designed as a suite and is supposed to be fully integrated. 

And the advantage of an open source product is that there are a lot of folks tuning it to their purposes.  Some of them are quite brilliant and creating specific little modifications that can be very useful.  I've run across this with GIMP, which is an alternative to programs like Photoshop. 

We'll see if the product makes the cut.  I've knocked out a few documents with it, and it has been very similar to MS Office.  It also can convert documents from MS Office (and other options) as well as convert TO other types of documents.  In that way it is a bit more flexible than many commercial options.