OpenOffice

It's an excellent free alternative to Microsoft Office, but is a long way from being a competitor. While it is quite powerful and compatible with MS Office files, it's interface isn't quite as good, and not all Microsoft features are available (especially when speaking of graphics, animation, and tables). I have Microsoft Office 2000 and Open Office 1.1.4 installed on an older computer for comparison sake, and would take MS Office over Open Office any day. While I don't remember MS Office 97 that well, I'd probably stick with it instead of going with the opensource alternative, at least until 2.0 comes out. (It's currently in Beta 2 which is available for download/use, although it still has a few bugs.)

Hope this helps,
John

For starters, it's XP compatible whereas Office 97 is twitchy glitchy on XP with no patch planned.

For greatness, the latest version has MySQL for the database which is worldclass and you don't want to know how much the Microsoft SQL costs.

Save in .DOC and such formats if you want to exchange documents with Microsoft users (slaves?).

The bonus of PDF creation is nice too.

Bob

I switched over to open office some time ago and ran into trouble with their rather constant updates. I used the spreadsheet for some financial stuff and word processor for letters and like that. The program worked fine, but the trouble occurred when they recommend a newer version and once that is installed I could no longer read my old documents created under version 1.bla.bla. Then I had to start all over again and recreate, after the second upgrade I dumped open office and back to MS for the reliabliity.