So I can't find my old Microsoft Office 2002 CD (It was Office Pro, which included Access, which I dabbled in) and looked at the prices of today's offerings, and.... whew. Doesn't Bill Gates know I'm po folk???

So I found this (FREE, but limited to people in the USA, sorry) and it's so similar to Microsoft's offering I'm wondering why Gates didn't sue them. To say I was pleased was an understatement.

But, I just got it today, used it some to make some forms I need, and am now wondering.

What's the catch??? Am I going to get bombarded with ads? Is my PC about to be overrun with viruses? Is ALL of my privacy now gone (what little may left anyway)????

My pappy once told me, "Son, if it's too good to be true, it probably isn't." This seems too good to be true. A free version of software that costs several hundreds of dollars.

What say you goggers???

ADDED IN EDIT: Whoops, sorry, forgot the link.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00PT6GQY4

EDIT 2: WHOA, when I click that link there's a message saying "OldFatGuy, you purchased this on February 26, 2015" with a link to my software library. Which has a few games in it. Please tell me I'm the only one seeing that when I click on that link or I better delete it I guess.

EDIT 3: Oh, and I gotta brag on my new internet speeds. Over 200MB and took less than a minute!!!! I love it!!

Here is the official link : [url=]www.libreoffice.org[/url]

It's free by design :-). LibreOffice is a fork of OpenOffice.org. This was formerly developed by Sun, then Oracle bought Sun and the development slowed tremendously down. So they forked it.

libreoffice is free to download for everybody
http://www.libreoffice.org/

in fact im downloading it right now just to see if i could
and yes i can

if all you want is word processing abiword might also be a good alternative

I've been using LibreOffice for years, and it's works perfectly for my limited needs.

https://www.libreoffice.org/

Why download it from Amazon? you can get it from the source:

https://www.libreoffice.org/

LibreOffice is a fork of the Open Office suite (you never heard of them? like, really?) which is in turn an open source version of the old Star Office. As other open source projects, it is free to use and there is no catch. It is what we use at work and I can tell you I don't miss MSOffice in the least.

I'd say download it and give it a go. It's totally kosher, if you still have reservations, read here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreOffice

i think with 4 links to libreoffice that he gets it now ;p

Welcome to Free Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS). It's free of charge, the source code is open and anyone can use it. No hooks attached, no malware, no ads. If you like it you can make a donation to the project or even help working on it.

And while you're at it, you might as well consider replacing Windows with Linux, a free open operating system ;)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux

Open Source software is great and often times good enough for most people's needs. It might not always be able to keep up with proprietary software, but most people will never notice the difference.

If you're familiar with the pre-ribbon MS Office, LibreOffice should look and feel very familiar.

LibreOffice is free and like what other users said, download it from official website.

It's a great office suite and many of my friends use it. Very good alternative for similar commercial products.

Oh, sorry to all, the thing on the Amazon site said it was available only to US addresses.

My bad.

Oh, and I did download it, and used it. And as I said, was more than pleased. It almost seems a carbon copy of Microsoft's product, at least Excel and Word (haven't used the database portion yet)

But THANK YOU ALL very much, and no, I had not heard of it (or at least, don't remember it) and now feel much better.

Oh, and the reason I got it off Amazon was because I was shopping for a new office product there, and it came up. So I got it there.

:))... He's download now! :D

It's not as elegant as Microsoft Office, and some of the shortcuts are different... But it's legitimate, and it works.

I've been using LibreOffice for years. The website features the latest version (4.4.1) if you want to use that. The Amazon only mentioned 4.3.

Now, if you used to use advanced features like macros and whatnot in the Microsoft applications, it's likely that LibreOffice won't be able to interpret those correctly as its support for VBA is less than stellar. Also, it's likely that any Microsoft documents you open in LibreOffice will have slight differences in how they look. Shouldn't be anything major though (unless, again, VBA was a major part in what you did).

I have very little use for behemoth office suites, so I cannot compare the two reliably, but for what little I do use, LibreOffice is perfectly sufficient.