Let’s face it. Not all students have the cash to slam down for that copy of MS Office to use Word, Excel, or Powerpoint for your assignments. To be honest, I’m not sure most teachers do either. It would be handy to have a free alternative that students\teachers could use at home that gave the same features and was compatible enough to have files open in MS Office. Enter OpenOffice.Org.

OpenOffice is an office suite, similar to what most of us are used to with Microsoft’s product line. The difference… it’s free. It offers replacements for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and even has a few extra useful applications.

So how compatible is it? TechRepublic has an article of some testing done to see what will work between OpenOffice and MS Office. Link

What’s the catch then? How is it free you ask. There really isn’t a catch. This software is released as open source. At a very basic level open source is very similar to “free software”. It’s free because its creators want people to use it, and improve it.

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What free software are you sporting in your classroom? Drop us some comments and let us know.