My district generally does not have access to Microsoft Office. In fact we have over 2,000 computers, yet we have fewer than 200 licenses of Office. Changing that is a priority for me & is a work in progress. In the meantime there are free alternatives that you can use that are completely compatible with Microsoft Office, including Word, Excel, & PowerPoint.
These options fall into two categories; 1) software & 2) online solutions.
Software: The top options here are Openoffice.org and it’s little brother (albeit larger download) NeoOffice.org. These two solutions are very similar, the main difference being that Neo is essentially a repackaging of OpenOffice.org made to look & feel more like Mac software. Neo is about a 140MB download & Open is a mere 63MB. (note: both of these downloads are free but you can donate $ if you like & use them, which would be really nice of you.)
In the online category there are a few more options. I use Google Docs quite often. It is fast, safe secure, & very convenient. Google has also recently released a Google Docs offline app that both allows you to work with your Google docs offline, then synchs when you get back online. (Note: this offline application also supports other platforms including WordPress, which our district uses as our blog solution.)
Two other online solutions are Acrobat.com & Zoho.com. I’ve dabbled with both, & both may have things you may like over Google…but I’m a Google user!
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I’d love to move my dist to Open Office. Been using 3.0 for a few months and I rarely go back to Microsoft. Would be hesitant to move Bus Office people over, but maybe later.
Am considering doing a pilot of kids to use it next year. Don’t want to move to Office 2007/2008 as both offer little IMHO.
Just started using Google Docs Edu edition in one of our 3rd grades. Been going well. Am also considering moving kids to Gmail, but filtering accounts through Gaggle. Expensive buy dont’ know an easy way to use Gmail without.