openoffice.org ?

Depends on whether you're using dial-up or broadband. openoffice is about 200-250 megs.

There's a smaller version, Portable OpenOffice, at http://portableapps.com/apps/office/suites/portable_openoffice ; it's about 86 megs, and was meant to be carried on a flash drive.

 

If you are on dialup and in a hurry, office depot sells a 19.00 version of open office, or used to anyway. If you read the fine print it tells you it is open office. It is some other name on the front as I remember.

 

If someone is selling freeware, ain't that illegal?

 

I thought it strange as well.

I contacted open office folks and they allow some companies to package open office with other items and sell it.

 

you used to be able to buy an open office CD for something like 5 or 10$. It was mostly to cover the cost of the CD and shipping. You won't find excel for that price even on eBay.

 

Try Sphygmic Spreadsheet. Only 918kb, so it quickly downloads, even on a dial up. You can download it, along with other choices, at http://www.freeware-guide.com/dir/business/spreadsheets.html.

It's free, but only runs on MS Windows.

 

The Openoffice download is 80 megs.
Note that Star Office from sun is nbasically a commercial version of the same.
It is a pretty decent program actually though I still use excel.

BTW, I got a peak at the new Excel 2007 yesterday and it is much improved.

 

In what ways is it improved? As one who lives and breathes building models in Excel and VBA I am curious. Is it more than the user interface update?

 

I posted this elsewhere but if you download the trial of Java desktop you can if your clever and crafty enough glean Star Office from it, it's not illegal and no license is required.

Besides, Open office is easier to get and free.

 

I have only used Excel 2007 briefly. So far I only see UI improvments.
I just hope the Mac version comes out about the same time. I currently mostly use Excel 2004

 

I use OpenOffice and I think it's great! Well worth the download.

If you are looking for something similar to Excel you could try Google's Online Spreadsheets: http://spreadsheets.google.com/

 

The biggest change to Office 2007 is that it is all XML based, you can take open a XML based Excel file and open it in a HTML editor and see the XML code.

 

Besides the most obvious advantage of OpenOffice being FREE, it has the awesome capability to save your documents as PDF's. This is a wonderful feature if you would like to post a series of lessons on a church website, or perhaps make a newsletter, or any document for the world to be able to view!

It can also save presentations as flash animations for incorporation on a website. Very Cool!

 

Openoffice Impress can export your Powerpoint files as flash.
This is what I do to put some of my sermons on our website.