Microsoft Office also called MS Office is the de facto office software used through out the world. MS Office suite in it’s basic version comprises of a word processor (MS Word), a spreadsheet (Excel) and a presentation software (PowerPoint).

One grouse that many  people have in using MS Office is that it saves your documents in proprietary file formats. Now a days open file formats are gaining precedence as it is perceived that your data should not be tied to one particular software or platform.

The following are a few very good, free, alternatives to Microsoft Office.

OpenOffice.org

OpenOffice.org is by far the most popular free alternative to Microsoft Office. It rivals MS Office in the number of features it sports. OpenOffice.org stores all your data in an international open standard format and can also read and write files from other common office software packages. It can be downloaded and used completely free of charge for any purpose.

OpenOffice.org Writer user interface

OpenOffice.org comprises of a word processor (Writer), a spreadsheet (Calc), presentation software (Impress), drawing software (Draw), and Formula application (Math). OpenOffice.org is available for multiple operating systems and different architectures thus making it truly portable.

KOffice

KOffice is an integrated office suite built on the KDE platform. It utilizes free and open standards like Open Document for its document formats, component communication and component embedding.

KOffice KWord user interface

KOffice includes the following components :

• KWord -  Word processing and desktop publishing application.
• KSpread -  Spreadsheet.
• KPresenter – Presentation software.
• Kivio – A diagraming and flow charting application.
• Karbon14 – A vector drawing application.
• Krita – A graphics application.
• KPlato – A project management application.
• Kexi – Integrated data management application.

Lotus Symphony

Lotus Symphony – IBM® Lotus® Symphony™ is a richly-featured set of productivity tools that are intuitive and easy to use and provided at no charge. There are three applications that make up Lotus Symphony: Lotus Symphony Documents, Lotus Symphony Spreadsheets, Lotus Symphony Presentations. Lotus Symphony has been built upon the Eclipse foundation. It has tabbed support and has an inbuilt web browser too.

Symphony wordprocessor interface

As you can see, there are numerous very powerful free alternatives to Microsoft Office suite.