Not a Hardware question, but I trust you guys.

WaldoCorn

Forgive the intrusion but as my mind slips I forget the easy stuff and know you will tell me the straight poop. Whats that Free open source alternative to, Microsoft Word, thats been around a while and is easy to use? The dude that wrote is is kinds like the one who wrote 7zip? Thanks.

Moirae

Open Office or Libre Office. I started using Libre Office at work because it seems to work better for my spreadsheet needs than Open Office. And be careful of both of them, last time I installed Open Office, it brought malware with it. At home, I reached the end of my rope with them both and finally paid for a copy of MS Office with excel, and word on black friday. 

WaldoCorn

Yeah they both ring a bell, probably is one of them that I used, long enough ago that I don't remember. Thanks man.

Cleffy

Google docs.

Four0Six

Cleffy said:

Google docs.

I have to agree here.

Ridelynn

OpenOffice has lost a lot of developer support lately since it was adopted by Apache, LibreOffice is more or less the newer alternative. Both of those were ultimately derived from StarOffice.

Google Docs works well, so long as your willing to go through Google

Quizzical

I use LibreOffice and it works.  I'd rather not have to go through a web browser as you do for Google Docs, but your preferences may reasonably be different from mine.

Loke666

I use Word but my friends who want something free all use open office, they say it is just as good but I am not sure if they want to convince me or themselves.

I always thought it was a shame that Ms Word became the standard program and not Word perfect but that is more a history lesson.

Cleffy

I use Microsoft Office 365.

Renoaku

Libre Office.

Ozmodan

Isn't Open Office owned by Oracle?  I would never touch anything they own.  Use Libre Office myself and like it much better than Word.  Don't really know why anyone would waste money buying Word or Excel.

Ridelynn

OpenOffice is currently run by Apache, which is still very much independant.

StarOffice was purchased by Sun back in the late 90's. 

OpenOffice had spun off of StarOffice as an open source project by Sun (with StarOffice remaining the commercial product) in the early 00's, if I'm not mistaken. So it was a Sun open-source product for a long while (just like MySQL, Java, and Solaris).

OpenOffice was later adopted by the Apache after Sun was acquired by Oracle, and Oracle didn't want to deal with yet-another-Sun-open-source-project. That occurred in 2011 or so.

Ridelynn

I used to use OpenOffice up until a few years ago. Our office finally paid for Office for us, now we are on O365 and it works.

OO worked well enough for light and personal use, but you could tell once you got into some of the more complicated documents that it wasn't quite the same.