Great free productivity software

You don't have to pay Microsoft a nickle for word processing. Here is the best alternative choice to Microsoft Office; it's called Openoffice What is Open office? It's and I quote from their site:

"open-source office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It is available in many languages and works on all common computers. It stores all your data in an international open standard format and can also read and write files from other common office software packages. It can be downloaded and used completely free of charge for any purpose."

What this means is that you get for free:

• A Word compatible word processor
• An Excel compatible spreadsheet program
• A PowerPoint compatible presentation program
• An Access compatible database program

Basically you won't need Microsoft anymore. Oppen Office is available for Windows, MAC OSX, and Linux. It comes with many Linux installations when you install the operating system. This is some good stuff, and you can save your files directly to Microsoft formats or to PDF.

Another good word processor to check out is AbiWord,  and if you need to do collaborative work you can use Word compatible Google docs. Google docks has a word processor and spreadsheet that can be used to share documents or allow  many people work on them.

There are others too, here is a nice link to free word processors for many different platforms.

Dan