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This office suite is compatible with Microsoft Office, and is completely free--it's available at http://www.openoffice.org/

From PC Magazine (http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1851003,00.asp):

REVIEW DATE: 09.06.05

BOTTOM LINE: Unlike the slow, clunky original version, version 2.0 of this free productivity suite is surprisingly slick and highly compatible with Microsoft Office file formats. It even offers features not found in its expensive Microsoft counterpart.

PROS: Free. Good compatibility with Microsoft Office documents. PDF converter built in.

CONS: No support for Word macros or Excel pivot tables.
COMPANY: www.openoffice.org
SPEC DATA
Type: Professional

* Price: Free.
* Company: OpenOffice.org, www.openoffice.org

EDITOR RATING: 4 of 5 stars

If you can remember the name of OpenOffice.org, you can remember where to download it for no charge. If you tried the previous 1.1.4 version, the 2.0 beta version currently available will be a pleasant surprise. Unlike the slow, ugly, and underpowered earlier version, 2.0 is swift, smooth, and highly compatible with Office documents. Even better, it has plenty of features that you can't find in MS Office itself.

The 76MB download expands into five applications: the Writer word processor, Calc spreadsheet, Impress presentations program, Base database program, and Math equation editor. OpenOffice.org uses an XML-based file format by default, but it opens and saves files in MS Office format seamlessly, without special prompts or warnings.

Our tests showed impressive compatibility with MS Office documents, although Word macros-notorious for security problems-won't run in OpenOffice.org. Heavily formatted Word files opened in Writer almost exactly as they did in Word, even when they included tracked changes, drawing objects, and other advanced features. We didn't expect Word's (largely ignored) animated text to translate into Writer, and it didn't.

Writer adds a PDF-export feature that Word doesn't offer, a find-and-replace feature that uses wildcards and regular expressions, and an impressive macro and scripting feature that organizes your macros in a tree-structured display. Advanced find-and-replace operations (such as those involving fonts and attributes like italics) are easier to manage in Writer than in Word's confusing Find dialog, although Word makes it easier to find special characters like dashes.

The Calc spreadsheet opened most of our test Excel files with few problems (save for some minor mislabeling and misalignments in charts), though charts based on pivot tables tended to be blank. We found Calc's menus and dialogs easier to navigate than the corresponding dialogs in Excel. The Impress presentations software is feature-rich and easily managed, with tabs for notes, outlines, slide-sorting, and other conveniences.

But the program can't do everything that the MS Office suite can do. There's no online collaboration or Smart Tags, for example, no grammar checking, and no highly flexible outlining, smart table formatting, or research task pane. And being free software, it has no tech support in the traditional sense. But the Web site does host a huge community-based support forum where you can usually get fast, detailed answers to any queries not covered under the FAQ section.

Anyone who doesn't want to pay Microsoft's premium prices for rarely used features may prefer this free suite. It does most everything that typical users need it to do, and does some things better than MS Office.