Without a doubt I would suggest Open Office as your replacement for Word (and the rest of the Office suite)

http://www.openoffice.org/
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Dang, this question was so obvious other folks beat me to it in minutes. But really, OpenOffice.org is a suite of great products and its Word equivalent is called Writer. It is free. It is basically created and maintained by Sun, although it is open source (best of both worlds).


Source(s):
www.openoffice.org

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As others suggest, it has to be Sun's Open Office: http://www.openoffice.org/

Has just about everything you might need in an Office Suite. Compatible with Excel (97-2003 format) of over 99% ..Word compatibility isn't quite perfect (as the internal structure of .doc files is a bit messy ..hell, even the Word2007 guys leave the original rendering engine in for legacy documents), but it's pretty good.

Note: All of Open Office uses Java to run, so its performance isn't as good as MS Office, but with most modern machines this isn't much of a problem.

Also tecchie people have a tendency to install it on friends machines without explaining the difference between Open Office and MS Office, or setting the default save formats to MS Office where appropriate. This confuses people. (I see it many times here at university: people who are confused why their Open Office documents won't open here.) Be careful how it will affect the way someone expects to use Office.

If you have a Mac, I'd probably suggest the iWork suite (Pages, Keynote, Numbers) over Open Office. It's developing to be quite a good suite. Numbers is a little immature still, but Pages and Keynote are beautiful programs. http://www.apple.com/iwork ...and for those Mac people heavily into word-processing, Scrivener is definitely worth a look: http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.html (it's super-pretty) :)
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Another vote for Open Office, although sometimes it's possible to get StarOffice for free. My version of StarOffice is just a little bit quicker and slimmer than the most current version of OpenOffice.
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Well granted that as we all seem to agree openoffice is your best shot, why don't you take it a step further?There is a portable version of openoffice, you can install it on a pendrive and have all of it at hand with you always
Source(s):
http://portableapps.com/apps/office/openoffice_portable

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Yes, as the others said, OpenOffice is very good. I will also direct you to the one, a bit fancier interface, that is BASED ON OpenOffice (they're partners). It's ALSO free. It's IBM Lotus Symphony:http://symphony.lotus.com/software/lotus/symphony/home.nsf/home
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Without any doubt, OpenOffice. I actually like using it much and much more the MS Office...
Source(s):
http://www.openoffice.org

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