LO is a fork of Open Office. You can save files as .doc or a bunc of other formats. I don't recommend getting rid of MS Office for now, but I think LO has enough for me to use it. Its better than pirating MS Office that's for sure. They're also removing as much of Java as they can, which is super awesome in my book. MS Office 2010 is better, but LO is free. So whatever.
http://www.libreoffice.org/download/
You'll want 3.4
LO does not have an equivalent of Outlook though. To replace that, you could use Thunderbird with the Lightning extension:
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thu...don/lightning/
Libre will get faster, count on it. Two years from now, it'll be better than MS Office.
I find I need both Gnumeric and Calc (from OpenOffice or LibreOffice), since, while I prefer Gnumeric because it's faster and easier to use, Gnumeric routinely screws up when I'm copying hex data to a spreadsheet. So I copy and paste in Calc, but I do everything else in Gnumeric.
Libreoffice could and should do for word processing what Firefox did for browsers.
Its easily good enough now to replace office for the average uni student or whoever.
QuoteLibre will get faster, count on it. Two years from now, it'll be better than MS Office.
Right now the document foundation is trying to replace Java with C++, in order to make it faster.
While I really wish they'd move onto something a little newer than C++ (Like Objective C, maybe. Something with garbage collection.), at least it's not Java.