For years Microsoft Word has been the tool that many of us reach for when we want to write a letter. Similarly, think about creating a spreadsheet and Excel springs immediately to mind. But if you don’t already own a copy of Microsoft Office you could be in for a nasty surprise when you see how much it costs.

The cheapest version of Office is £120. This price is for home users only, so if you want to create documents for a small business you’ll need to pay £310 for the standard edition.

With these prices in mind, it’s easy to see why many people are tempted by Open Office ­ a complete office suite that can be downloaded free. But is this too good to be true? Can you switch to a free alternative and never look back, or do you get what you pay for? Read on to find out.

Free for all
Open Office is a complete office suite released as “open source” software. This means that, like the Linux operating system, anyone is free to download it, use it, see the code that makes it work and even alter it if they wish. Broadband users can download the latest version, which weighs in at 113MB, here. Those with no internet access, or using a slower dial-up connection, can request a copy on CD from www.openoffice.org ­ you only need to pay the cost of postage. If you are downloading Open Office, choose to save the file to your Desktop, then double-click it to start the installation process. Follow the prompts on screen and in around a couple of minutes Open Office will be installed and ready to use.

First impressions
Many of us are so used to looking for Microsoft’s Word, Excel and Powerpoint that Open Office’s alternatives ­ Writer, Calc and Impress ­ can seem a little bit confusing at first. Writer is obviously a word processor, Calc is a spreadsheet rather like Excel and Impress is designed, like Powerpoint, for creating and showing presentations.

There are three other programs in the Open Office suite, known as Base, Draw and Math ­ these are less commonly used, so we’ll come to them later.

Even if you are blown away by Open Office, Microsoft’s programs remain overwhelmingly dominant in the UK’s offices, so it’s likely that most of the documents you receive by email will be saved as .doc or .xls files.

Fortunately, Open Office recognises these, and can open, save and create these files, making sharing documents with people who use Microsoft Office simple.

There is, however, one significant exception: when it created Office 2007, Microsoft introduced new document types with the file extension .docx and .xlsx. Open Office cannot currently open these files.
This problem isn’t limited to Open Office users, as Microsoft’s own earlier versions of Office can’t open them without installing an extra converter. For the moment, the only solution is to ask any Office 2007 users to save any documents as standard .doc and .xls files instead.