Microsoft Office

[Eratosthenes]

I agree, you really should give openoffice.org a try. It is free and intended to be free. I have used both the word processor and the spreadsheet a lot. I have had no problem importing files that were saved by office in office formats.

The latest version has an Access replacement. It doesn't work all that well for me, so if you need access you need to go with Office or just buy stand alone Access and use OO.o for the other stuff.

[Flashy]

Buy the student or teacher edition - its $100+. You can install on 3 machines.
And then you will have a legal version.
This seems to be a discouting angle by Microsoft to reach the masses while perserving a high price for business.

[maurile]

Another vote for OpenOffice.org. It's very much like MS Office for most purposes. And you can even create PDF files in it.

[Munga30]

There's no visual basic in OpenOffice, though, so if you need to run spreadsheets with embedded macros to *cough* *cough* sort data, you'll need Excel.

That being said, I use OO at home and love it.

[tek]

open office sucks. I tried it-I hated it. You get what you pay for.