If you are a fan of Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc) but don’t like the relatively high price tag, you should consider checking out Open Office. This is a suite of word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, graphics, and database programs that are completely free, open source, and available on all platforms (Windows, OS X, and Linux). Since Open Office is an open source project, it is supported by volunteer developers from a community of individuals that want to provide great free software to everyone. This means that it won’t be quite as powerful and as sexy as Microsoft Office, but it will be very close despite its no-cost incentive. The suite also supports most of the common Office formats so that files can be created and edited in either package without conflict. Go check it out!