win32 alternative to MS-Office

can any1 point me out to some nice ms-office win32 alternatives ? i'm NOT interested in all office's features, however, the ability to read & write DOC,XLS&PPT files is, naturally, a must. 10x ! Dg.

Reads and writes pretty much anything and severely OWNZ Microsoft products :D

openoffice is good, but you also can't not mention staroffice, there are a few other good ones out there too, a simple google search is in order DG ;)

603Pro PC Suite, RagTime private, papyrus Office, SOT Office, SoftMaker Office. bb

there was a test recently in c't and when it comes to reading complicated MS Office documents pretty much all alternatives suck I'm afraid to say. A while back I tried using OpenOffice and exchange data with a guy using MS Office.. simple PPT Presentations were okay but then he started adding a couple of formulas and from then on I only got garbage and had to switch back to MS Office. From that point on I decided not to experiment any further. At my day job I use Word and Excel a lot and I can't afford editing a document, mail it out and then at the other end of the line people can't read it.

The _import_ of complicated M$ Office documents sometimes fails, true. But the _export_ to *.doc works flawless. (Erm, I talk about OpenOffice of course, not about one of the other suites mentioned.) (At least on my end here). Regards Koepi

thanks guys :) ! since i'm a dial-up user, i'll start with downloading openoffice. Cheers, Dg.

Well if all you need is a word processor you can get ABIWORD... () Its just a word processor and as such is much smaller than open office (say 10 megs) :) Good luck though

thanks, d.co, this abiword looks very nice!