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OpenOffice...you should try it

if you haven't tried OpenOffice.org 1.9+ as an MSOffice replacement, you should. it's come through in a pinch for quite a few sticky situations for me lately, notably:

• it was able to open a PowerPoint document that was authored on a mac but when opened on the PC in MS PowerPoint gave me "QuickTime plugin required" for all the embedded graphics. OpenOffice had no problem opening the document
• Adobe Acrobat would only render an Excel file to PDF as a solid black square. Exporting the document to PDF from OpenOffice calc created a perfect PDF

how can this be? how can a stand-in perform better than the applications that define the file formats? I don't know but it does, and for all intents and purposes, it's free right now.

I also think the OpenOffice Word clone is much than MS Word at editing tables. If you have to edit a document that uses tables, you should definitely try it.