I cannot afford Microsoft office at this point in my life. I downloaded for free open office from www.openoffice.org . I would like to know if this is a good program to use?

Poet 31,

Firstly, I welcome you to this great site!

It is really a wonderful and great prgramme to use. The facilities, which it offers are excellent. If you have any queries, you are welcome to ask.

Depends on your needs. Open Office can work with Office files and can do much of what Word, Excel and PowerPoint can do.

The only issue I have ever had, if you email someone a file, depending on what program they use to open it, they may have trouble opening it.

I used it on a personal computer for several years.

Open office os great, however due to Oracle having bought Sun support for open Office (largely supported bu sun ) has wained, Fear not LibreOffice (http://www.libreoffice.org/download/) is a fork and is managed by a majority of the proect managers and developers from the Old Open Office. LibreOffice (http://www.libreoffice.org/download/) is open office with better support
For the problem with emailing open office docs remember OpenOffice & libreOffice (http://www.libreoffice.org/download/) can be configured to save by default in MS Office File Formats.