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I'm at my cousins on the laptop. There's a trial version of Microsoft Office 07. That's been around for a while so I went to see if MS released a new version yet and apparently they made Office 2010. I might download the trial to see what it's like. I didn't like the 07 office. I only used Word but they have everything hidden in various tabs. I liked the Word 03 layout better. The Win7 paint also sucks for similar reasons. The only thing it has I prefer over the XP paint is the ability to zoom out on a picture. I'm not a big time artist so Paint is simple enough for my needs.

If you live under a rock Microsoft Office has a variety of programs for your use, The more basic office packages are cheaper but have less programs. The higher end cost more but offer more programs. The most basic package is the Home & Student program which includes a word processor, spreadsheet, power point, and some note storage program for $150. The highest end package is Professional which has the H&S package plus database, an email client, and a publishing program all for $500.

They further break it down to each individual program you can buy without the package. The note writing program costs $80. They have some kind of diagramming program that can range from $250 to $1000 depending on the version you purchase. All the other programs are $140 a piece.

This seems pretty pricey doesn't it? Microsoft charges an awful lot for their software. I think this just encourages people to pirate software. If they charged $50 per program that would make sense. The note thing I think is useless since you can save .txt files with your various notes and organize them. That's what I do. The email client I think is also pretty useless. I guess it gives the user some customization but probably not enough to be worth $140.

Openoffice.org is a free program I use instead. I haven't upgraded it in forever but the word processor had a layout similar to Word 03. Open Office has a free alternative to every program MS Office has and I think has a few more programs. One of the concerns with something like this is format compatibility. MS Office is quite overpriced but it is pretty mainstream. MS has another word processor called MS Works. Works and Word save in different formats which can make it difficult to switch between the two. If I recall Word can accept a file from Works but Works can't accept a file from Word because of format incompatibility. Different programs use different formats. Open Office is compatible with word though. I'm not sure about works though. Still as long as you remember to save the document as an MS Word document it will work on both Word and Open Office.