Open Office is an Open Source alternative to the Microsoft Office Pro Suite.   It uses the new universal standard for documents known as opendocument standard.   It has all of the bells and whistles of MS Office Pro Suite of programs including a Presentation manager (Powerpoint alternative) and Base database manager (Access database alternative).   

I've been using Open Office as my main office program for nearly a year and love it.   It may take a little time to get used to the positioning and names of things, but once you do you'll wonder where this has been all these years.   I've used Writer (MS Word alternative) for designing the Minnesota Coaches Association newsletter.   The beauty of the open document standard is that it doesn't matter what version of software you have or what platform the software is based or what brand the software is.  If it can read and work with open document format you can trust its formating anywhere.  Kind of like what Adobe Acrobat does - creates a truly cross platform document, except in this case you can edit the document.

Oh!!!! and don't forget the coolest element of Open Office and perhaps the THE reason to investigate it is that there is a PDF (Adobe Acrobat format) generator built into the entire program so you can create PDFs from any of the Open Document Programs.   

Did I mention that it is FREE! Because it is an Open Source program it is available to everyone FREE.  http://www.openoffice.org