MOO (More Office Options)

Microsoft Office is a very powerful set of tools. I'm not sure there's a better spreadsheet program than Excel 2007.

But in case you don't want to shell out huge amounts of cash, you have other options you can at least try out for free to see if they work for you.

Google Documents
Open Office
and now the new Lotus Symphony (from IBM).

There may be other options too (I know I've seen other word processors around anyway) but I've tried out the first two of these and highly recommend them. There's a little bit of functionality that I have in Excel that is lacking in Google Documents and Open Office, so maybe Lotus Symphony will be a new favorite.

I mainly wanted to announce Lotus Symphony, since it's new. Lotus 1-2-3 used to be very popular, and now Lotus Symphony is available for free using the same engine. Oh, and it now uses open source document filetypes.

Take that Microsoft! You may have superior products, but some others are catching up! Their price tag is better, their shareability is better (they don't have their own proprietary file types), and they have a growing knowledge base working on them.

Happy documenting!

Edit:
There's another suite of free online office products I just found! Zoho, which is neat because it's pretty expansive. There are spreadsheet, powerpoint, and document products, of course, but also invoicing, projects, web conferencing, business products, wikis, and much more. Enjoy!