for a few more days you can get Microsoft Office, complete, for 91% discount, totally legit, if you are a student with an edu email address. I eschewed MSOffice for OpenOffice, which is freeware and a great tool. however, MS products are default everywhere. tho OO can save to doc format, you have to tell it to, so there is this whole compatability thing that may make OO less useful for you. so I have turned back to MS, just to be well-armed. which leads me to mull the words processors I have used. Xywrite, back in the day, that long agone day. back in the day of command driven programs. Xywrite was brisk and efficient. as I understand, it was eventually swallowed up whole by IBM, tho it had been an industry standard for newspaper publishing. less so was my 1st shareware, PC-write, which just seemed clunky. I mean, I bought the thing, had the documentation, but never enjoyed the writing experience, which wasn't to my mind intuitive. I learned Word Perfect at work. I did graphics with it, which were a pain, defining EXACTLY where they would sit in the document and such, those triangulations were difficult. Word was much like WP, I just wanted a typewriter, mostly. but you can typeset books with Word, if you are careful. OpenOffice and Word give you a lot of power in producing documents. Word is clearly a clunky program. files are much larger in Word than OO, astonishingly so. in the days of gigabytes, that is not so important, but it remains telltale. I have only used Word 2007 a little, it is a symphony of bells and whistles. all of which work, after a fashion,, but it is more like a computer game than a program. not to go all MS-negative. if you make eligibility for the deal, and have the 60 bucks, I recommend that you strive for this deal, which ends May 16. the documentation for OO kinda sucks, tho there is a turmoil of dedicated explainers in the community. MS has a universe of vocal users. I think technical issues are under regarded in poetry world. I needed Erin's help, and angel Shanna Compton's generous (Photoshop issues) intervention, to get Days Poem, the manuscript, into proper fettle. brothers and sisters, it is a tech world. part of your poem's broadcast resides in making it computer feasible. yes, you can find an 18 year old to tech out, but you still must understand what the 18 year old is talking about. and you can work your own magic. so anyway, a slew of business-like, grownup up programs could be yours if you have that edu email address.