Open Office?

I use Open Office on my Linux which often comes preinstalled with it anyway, though the only one I've exploited much is Open Office.org Word Processor, yes, its just fine as it would support formats from MS Word but on the version I had of Open Office (on a Linux), it is set to save your work to .odt format which is to my knowledge, is unsupported by MS Word but you can choose to save to another format like doc, docx, rtf. However if you worked on MS Word to put some designs, bullets and some other enhancement effects, you might find those things unsupported by Open Office.

So here's my verdict on Open Office:

The Good:

1. Its Free.
2. It has lots of features that you might just find useful.
3. It supports formats that you usually save your MS Office works with.
4. It also comes with a portable build that can be installed on a flashdrive then used on another computer which doesn't install as much components in your computer and its registry. (MS Office suite installs thousands of keys in the registry.)

The Bad:

1. It just look unpolished compared to MS Office that if you got yourself hooked with MS Office's ribbon interface, eye candy icons and visual effects, you might find working on Open Office to be uneasy and you might think it sucks.

2. Its just not as technically advanced as MS Office as some apps on MS Office would immediately present beautiful templates to work with. Of course MS Office users would need some time to adjust themselves to Open Office.

3. The portable build of Open Office that I got was very prone to crashes on Windows 7, that I decided to take it out and put it on my flashdrive instead.

But overall, its just fair to use but it remains your choice.