[RESOLVED] Seek Free Office Suite Recommendations

A relative recently bought a Gateway laptop running XP HOME. It came with Works installed. She's asked me about buying MS Word (or Office) to replace it.

I told her I remember seeing a number of free office suite out there that may be just as good.

Before I recommend any of them, does anyone have any actual experience with OpenOffice or other free office software?

Thanks in advance,

Open Office is an excellent alternative to M$ office. Used it with several different distros of Linux (and Windows) without incident.

Here's a link to OpenOffice;

http://www.openoffice.org/

I've used it with Linux for sometime. Does everything MS Word does and more. It doesn't cost anything to give it a try. If you don't like it, you can always un-install it.

I haven't found anything that I like nearly as much as MS Office (especially the 2003 version), but Open Office is the only free one that comes even remotely close.

Thanks all.

From these and other sites' posts, it seems that Open Office is the way to go.

I have used Open Office and I agree it is really good.

You may consider splitting up the idea of office software though. For example get a wordprocessor, spreadsheet etc separately.

PS: I quite like Lotus Smartsuite.