Open Office, is a good alternative!

After using Microsoft Office products for the past 10yrs, I recently started using "Open Office" products in my personal laptop... it's been impressive, able to do pretty much most of the document creation, editing in open office as I have on MS Office.

It provides compatability with MS Office documents & seem an easy transition path, options & toolbars available is different, less in OO - but it's only a matter of time you would get used to it.

It breaks your rhythm from doing the same thing over in MS Office, go ahead & give a try to OO...

-Bhaskara