MOST OF US who treat the PC as being synonymous with Microsoft Windows have- at one point or other- been introduced to Micro¬soft Office and its three most popu¬Lar productivity applications viz. MS Word, MS Excel, and MS Power¬point. What would offices around the world do without these three mus¬keteers, I wonder?
And of course, forged from the need for free software, OpenOffice.org provides an open source alternative to Microsoft's proprietary productivity suite. But just to widen your choice, there is a deserving third entrant in the fray called Kingsoft Office 2007; and yes, it is absolutely free!

Kingsoft Office 2007 consists of three apps: Writer, Spreadsheet and Presentation which allow you to create and open .DOC, ,XLS and .PPT files, respectively, The overaLL interface of Kingsoft Office is quite literally a clone of the MS Office 2003 environment - down to the finaL inch. As a result, no Learning curve is required to habitu¬ate yourseLf and waste time searching for tooLs and functions as everything is just as it was in MS Office 2003 - minus the MS Office Logo, of course, It is also compati¬bLe with OpenOffice,org (,ODT)files without a hitch, Ease of use defines everything you can do with Kingsoft Office 2007.

You can efficiently create and edit word documents, spread-sheets, and slides how presenta¬tions, Have a host of templates to get started with, export files to PDF, and even securely encrypt them. On the downside, however, there's no app to manage e-maiLs (like MS Outlook), maintain data¬bases, or publish Web content. Guess it's just a matter of time before Kingsoft Office fortifies these chinks in its armor, in which case its competitors better watch out.
I've used Open Office, but felt Kingsoft Office's mimicking of Microsoft Office more beLievabLe, and the fact that it's free pro¬vides the perfect icing on the cake, Rest assured the staff won't compLain and businesses can save more than a few bucks. All's well that ends well, I dare say.