On our oldest computer we paid $200 or $300 for the full version of MS Office Pro ourselves.

On the PC we got last year we got a full copy of MS Office through Sheri's employer for only $20.

The $500 laptop we got in June is intended to be almost exclusively just a web browsing PC and did not buy MS Office. A lot of PC's, like this one, come preinstalled with MS Works. For the light word processing or quickie spreadsheet I might want to do when I am in a coffee shop and away from a primary PC MS Works is just fine.

Today they announced the release of OpenOffice.org 2.0. This is a free Office suite that has been primarily sponsored by Sun Microsystems, Novell, Red Hat, Debian, and Intel. Individual programmers around the world have helped with the development in their spare time similar to the way Mozilla's Firefox browser has been programmed.

OpenOffice is already the required office format for internal archives of the State of Massachusetts!

Some of the reviews I have read said the word processing and spreadsheet are almost exactly like MS Word and MS Excel, and in some places even better.

I think tonight I am going to download and install OpenOffice on the laptop and run it through its paces.