I recently bought a new computer, & while doing the research, I realized that the "microsoft office" package is an extra $300 - $400 .

somehow I got some obscured information about a software called "staroffice 5.1" that is made by "sun microsystems" & distributed over the internet, free! Since the price seems fair to me I downloaded it & installed it, & it works ! Their word processor is called "writer" & their spread sheet is called "calc".

There is an option there to save the files in word/excel '97 formats. I created some text & spread sheet files & saved them that way, & emailed them to a friend with "ms office 2000". he was able to open them without any problems.

the screens in that s/w look completely different than ms office, the buttons are in funny places on the screen & the menus are different, but after 5 minutes I realized it is actually the same thing.

There are also other applications in that package, that are parrallel to the applications in ms office.

This package can be downloaded from www.sun.com

They offer few ways to download it, & they also sell the cd with instructions book. There is a bunch of info there, so go look.

dassall,

not kayak related, but helpful anyway.

Erez