I have spoken in the past about applications used for creativity that are outside the mainstream, completely capable and usually much, much cheaper (and even free).

Examples include substitutes for the venerable Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Premiere, Sony Vegas and so on. Just a quick browse through the various categories at www.tucows.com will give you an idea of the avalanche of product out there.

But despite this, and very strong attempts at advances into its territory over the years from such heavyweights as Lotus, WordPerfect, Multimate, Borland and others, Microsoft remains king in the area of the three basics – word processing (Word), spreadsheet (Excel), database (Access) and the their associated siblings of PowerPoint, OneNote and of course Outlook.

While Outlook is certainly entrenched in our email mindset (or at worst, its little brother Outlook Express), and maybe I am the last to realise it, but there is an excellent – and free – substitute for the pricey Microsoft Office Suite called OpenOffice.

I had heard of the Open Source movement of course, but never had the time, inclination or reason to really look at any of the applications available. I had legitimate copies of MS Office on all my machines for example, was reasonably au fait with the programs in most cases and was altogether a happy little Vegemite. Purchasing the Asus Eee PC however, introduced me to the world of OpenOffice and I have to say I am very impressed.

The major reason I bought the Eee was for use on aircraft to write stories and edit. My full size notebook is an Acer Ferrari 5000, and while I love the beast, it is just too wide for typing with in a standard aircraft seat. There is a drawback with the Eee in that keyboard is smaller, but this is a small trade-off in usability under the circumstances I mainly use it under (it also doubles as a handy video viewer when movies / TV shows are stored on a decent sized USB stick).

Being pre-loaded with Xandros (a UNIX /LINUX spinoff), the Eee also comes with OpenOffice made up of database (Base), spreadsheet (Calc), drawing (Draw), presentation (Impres), word processing (Writer) and equation editor (Math).

I don't intend this to be a full review by any stretch of the imagination; suffice to say that if if you only use Microsoft Office for the barest of functions, or are a complete nutter to its functionality and can quote help file content verbatim, OpenOffice should suffice for your needs. And save you a pretty penny on the way through. (Oh and you don;t have to have LINUX by th way - XP or Vista is fine).

Go to www.openoffice.org.