MS Office alternative
 

I remember reading about a free program that is like microsoft office and I belive it actually can run some word and excel programs.

Does anyone know what this program is?

Have you tried OpenOffice? Version 3.0 was released not that long ago and has a lot of new features. Go to OpenOffice.org - The Free and Open Productivity Suite to download it and try it out.

Yep. I had a few people at work that preferred OO over M$ office.

Another vote for open office here. :thumbsup:

I've used OO, and it's okay. Word lately is that its development community is ailing--not enough people are hacking on it and the codebase has gotten too complex to be attractive to new developers.

If I was looking to replace Office, I think I'd look to replace it with web apps like Google Docs and Spreadsheets, which have collaboration components that put desktop-bound apps to shame.

OpenOffice is excellent - I use Office 2003 on my old laptop and have Office 2007 at work and like it just as much - for absolutely free. A cause worth donating to IMO.

OpenOffice FTW, I recommend it to many coworkers. Sadly enough a lot of them won't use it just because it's not named Word. I wish I was joking.

the only thing I need MS office for is easy table creation, and I have not that done in ages now - that is the biggest shortcoming in OpenOffice.org for me.
I use it for 99% of my document/spreadsheet/etc work, but still have recent builds of Corel Wordperfect and MS (2000, all I need) around.

OpenOffice is okay. I like that I can save into whatever format I may need to access the document from at work or from another computer. But there's an MS Office Blue floating around that I got to use a few times on a friend's computer overseas that was awesome.

I prefer OpenOffice (alt)and especially OpenOffice Portable. Many of my artsy friends prefer AbiWord (alt). As always, check out The Open Source/Freeware/Gratis Software Thread here at TFP.

Another vote for openoffice.org , even though myself personally I have never used it I have told friends about it and installed it for a couple of people and never heard complaints. Those people also never do anything on their computers where a standard application is needed so they really wouldn't know if they were missing any MS Office functionality or not.

I have tossed the idea around more than once to try it and see how it is, but being that I am in the process of looking for a job right now, I can see myself putting something together and submitting to an employer and they tell me it has some weird formatting or they can't open it or something.