You could be forgiven for thinking our computer landscape is dominated by Microsoft and it’s products. But, believe it or not, there are other software publishers to rival Microsoft.

Sun Microsystems publishes an office software suite equal to Microsoft office, and it’s free! OpenOffice runs on different operating systems and is open source software, so it’s free to download, use and distribute.

The suite of office products includes, wordprocessor, spreadsheet, database, vector drawing tool, presentation program and mathemetical function creator. And it’s supported by Sun, a global computer corporation. 

But the best part is, it’s good. I’ve used the wordprocessor, OpenOffice Writer, and it’s easy to use with the full range of features and functions we have come to expect from Microsoft Word.

These days you can buy a decent specification laptop with Microsoft Vista for just £400 (or $800), which I think is cheap. But it doesn’t usually come with Office, or you find yourself paying a few hundred pounds for it.

So getting a fully functioning office suite for free is a bargain.