I just zipped over to Amazon to price Microsoft Office: $407.99 for the full version that includes Access.

Wow. That's a lot of money. That's a painful amount of money, particularly for a set of programs that were released three years ago and requires wading through some nasty piracy-prevention systems just to install. That's a butt-bruising amount of money that could support my video game habit for a full year.

As I was knee-deep into reinstalling software on my new desktop, which is fresh back from warranty service and is a whole other nightmare of a blog post, I thought, what if I don't install Office on this machine for the fourth time? So I zipped over to OpenOffice.org and snagged the free competitor to the Microsoft suite.

I may never go back.

Like most people, I often pay lip service to "free software," but when push comes to shove, I scurry back to the pay-version standbies. But finally I'm caving, slowly but surely. 

So far, I'm awfully impressed with OOo, as it's sometimes abbreviated. A relatively small 100MB download gets you a full suite of apps: word processor, spreadsheet, database, presentation software, and a couple of supporting applications. The only gap in the suite is an email client. Though freebies like Thunderbird are readily available, even if you want to stick with Outlook, that'll run you just $90 or so.

I still have Office on my laptop, and sharing files between the two systems has been pretty seamless so far. And using them hasn't presented any real headaches either. Most menus and commands are similar enough to be just as intuitive as the Microsoft version. I'm still working through the various parts of the suite (don't need to calculate cosines in Excel every day), so the jury's still deliberating, but so far you can color me impressed.

You've got nothing to lose by giving it a try: You don't even need to provide an email address to download the full version of the software. Meanwhile, I hope to read your comments about using OpenOffice on the boards!