OpenOffice

Most of us use Microsoft Word and Excel in the office. But what if you want to work on a document at home? Many computers ship now with no office software pre-installed. If you don't want to spend hundreds of dollars for Microsoft Office, OpenOffice is a good free alternative. What is OpenOffice you ask? Think of OpenOffice as a free version of Microsoft Office-like programs. There's a word processing program, a spreadsheet program, a presentation program, etc. Best of all it allows you to both open and save documents in the Microsoft formats.

Version 2.2 of OpenOffice was released today. I use it on my home computers and I highly recommend it. There's a complete product description available here.