You can download Open Office for FREE at http://www.openoffice.org.  If you know how to use Microsoft’s productivity suite, you should have no problem adapting to Open Office.  One can create documents in Micosoft file format, so you can email a doc, file, etc to anyone else and the document would be compatible to open in their system.  The most recent release of this FREE, open source software is v2.4.  Check it out.