The vast majority of us do the same old things on a computer, a bit of wordprocessing, browsing the internet, maybe do a bit of photo editing and e-mail - from a business point of view you can add in spreadsheets, powerpoint presentations and maybe a bit of database work. What most people don't realise is that there is a vast array of free / opensource software out there that won't cost you a penny and provide similar functionality to their "paid for counterparts".

Microsoft Office

Essentially Microsoft Office Professional consists of MS Excel, MS Word, MS Access, MS Powerpoint and a couple of other programs, however, for a small business and the seemigly endless updates i.e Office 2003, Office 2007, Office 2010 etc etc coupled with the high cost of the software - keeping yourself legal and up to date is an expensive undertaking.

Thankfully there are two excellent alternatives offering similar functionality and more importantly can read all your existing MS Office files as standard.

OpenOffice 3

OpenOffice.org 3 is the one of the leading open-source office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It is available in many languages and works on all common computers. It stores all your data in an international open standard format and can also read and write files from other common office software packages. It can be downloaded and used completely free of charge for any purpose.

Libre Office 3

LibreOffice3 is another free power-packed Open Source personal productivity suite for Windows, Macintosh and Linux, that gives you six feature-rich applications for all your document production and data processing needs: Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw, Math and Base. Support and documentation is also free and it reads all existing Office documents too. You can download here.