Office became the “standard” suite of office applications for good reason, and it remains an excellent product today – providing most users with far more power and features than they’ll ever need or use. But it does come at a cost – which is, ironically, the price.

The free open-source OpenOffice.org has been gaining market share over the years with their MS-Office compatible office suite. And with their recent version 3 release, they’re bound to gain even more.

There is not a compelling reason to throw out your Microsoft Office license and switch over to OpenOffice. But, if it’s time to upgrade, or to purchase a new copy of an office suite, it’s definitely time to take a serious look at OpenOffice. Most people never look back.

This is the online version of the ever popular Quicken finance software from Intuit.

Quicken Online was introduced earlier this year, but up until this week there was a monthly subscription fee to use the service. Intuit has removed the fees to bring Quicking inline with the competition, such as Mint.com and others.

You should try a few similar online services to find out what works best for you.

However, you can get Microsoft compatible applications for word processing, spreadsheet, presentation and more completely free in the OpenOffice application available at OpenOffice.org.

The latest release of OpenOffice is quite refined and is worthy office suite alternative.

There are many great sources of educational freeware. Give Educational Freeware a look first, then expand your search out from there.