Many homeschoolers enjoy the benefits of using Microsoft Office.  Between Power Point, Excel, and Microsoft Word there are numerous activities, lessons, charts, graphs, and displays that can easily be created and used with your curriculum.  However, not everyone has Microsoft Office, or the featured word processor, Microsoft Word.

For those who feel that they have been missing out on numerous resources because they don’t have Microsoft Office, help is on the way.  There is a free word processor that is compatible with Microsoft Word documents and will even save your documents in PDF format if you choose.  The program is called, “Open Office.” You can download and install Open Office online and choose it as your main word processor.

When you want to open a Microsoft Word document, simply click on the file and Open Office will open it for you.  If you create a document in Open Office, you can choose to save it as a Word document, or even export it to a pdf file.  There are numerous formats available for saving your documents as well.

Open Office is “open source” software.  This enables it to be free of charge and also allows different programmers to create their own programs to enhance the software.  These programs are called “extensions” and can be downloaded free of charge as well.  A great place to find Open Office extensions can be found here: Open Office Extensions

You’ll find that once you download Open Office that it is very simple to use.