Free word processing software

Hi everyone, I was just wondering if anyone knew of some free word processing software that is equivalent or better than MS Word. Im a student and im short on cash, any ideas?

 

http://www.openoffice.org/

It 's a full fledged office suite & is open source.

 

i'll second, Open Office is the free Microsoft Office Professional.

 

Open Office. Although I don't personally use it. I stick to Microsoft Office.

 

OpenOffice, that autcomplete list made from current words does wonders when typing notes in class.

 

+1 for OpenOffice. It's amazing to be free.

 

OO is great for a free program! I can't believe it's still open source. However, the Word equivalent is MUCH better than the other three at competing with Office. Excel/Access's counterpart don't do them much justice.

Bottom line: you can't go wrong if you don't NEED MS Office.

 

Open Office is good, I use it.

 

+1 on openoffice. Free equivalent of MSoffice. It will even let you open and work on MSoffice files.

 

there is another useful word processor out there. it's web based (as in used within your browser Window) and it comes from Google...it's called Writely. www.writely.com I have used it. fairly easy, fairly decent. nice thing about it is being it's online (it saves your files to a server and/or to your PC) is that you can create a circle of friends/contacts that documents can be shared with. they can view them, and depending on the rights you give them, they can even open and edit them. the super convenient thing about it is you can access anywhere you can get on the internet with a browser.

 

Another +1 for OpenOffice, I use it and I think it rocks
IMHO it's as good as if not better than MS Office, although a little hard to get used to
For pure word processing, Abiword is pretty good too - www.abisource.com

 

I have been using OpenOffice.org exclusively since March '06. Never had any problems, it's simply great software.

 

OpenOffice.org has my vote. But it really depends on what you're trying to do. If you're thinking of writing your thesis or any substantially large document (100+ pages), you might want to investigate something like Latex or LyX. I learned Latex in a few hours and it did wonders for some of my 70+ page reports. I would have hated writing it in Office.

 

That being said, I still prefer OpenOffice.org over Word for long documents. It tends to be more stable, and doesn't corrupt the document when it saves it.

 

LaTex

A bit different from MS Word-style word processors, but also much more powerful, and in many cases, easier, once you get started.

 

+1 for openoffice

but if you use it for things like school and powerpoint presentation beware that the default extention is not .doc or .pps .
so you need to change it .

 

Another reason to use LaTex. Outputs to .pdf, which can be opened everywhere.

 

Openoffice can do that as well...

 

any link for a good guide to learn latex ?

 

I use mostly Latex under cygwin or Linux. It would be technically impossible to write complicated mahematical texts in openoffice. However, for writing non-technical plain texts I prefer openoffice.

 

That statement is an exaggeration. Complicated mathematical text can be written with OpenOffice.org Math.