Open Office is a free suite of tools that copies many of the functions of Microsoft Office. Open Office has been under development for more than 10 years and can run on Windows, Apple’s OSX, and Linux.

It is multilingual and includes a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, database and other tools. It can read and save files in Microsoft Office formats, like .doc for word processing files, .xls for spreadsheet files, and .ppt for PowerPoint. Most users add Thunderbird for email and Firefox for internet browsing, which are also free.

Open Office is very stable software, and is easy to try by downloading and installing the latest version.

Download Open Office from:

www.openoffice.org

For more information about Open Office visit:

www.ictknowledgebase.org.uk/openoffice2

A range of other free and open source software can be found at:

www.osalt.com or www.opensourcewindows.org/