Microsoft Office is a very powerful packagewith its Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Access programs.

It can also be powerfully expensive.

If you buy MS Office bundled with a new computer, it will probably add around $149 to your purchase price. If you don't buy it bundled with a new computer, you might have to pay as much as $499. However, if you qualify, you can buy the Student/Teacher Edition for a much better price -- around $149.

If $149 is too much for you, there's MS Works which comes bundled with many computers. It adds so little to a computer's purchase price, it might just as well be free. However, its look and feel can be kind of clunky and irritating and, in some ways, it's too elementary.

Speaking of free, there's OpenOffice.org, a very richly-featured suite of products that costs nothing. That's right. Nothing. And it includes a spreadsheet program, word processor, presentation program, database program and draw package. (Note: You can download OpenOffice.org from www. openoffice.org.)

The problem with MS Office and OpenOffice.org is that they have programs most of us will never use and features that most of us don't need.

For example, I am using OpenOffice.org's Writer program to write this article. When I click on Edit, I get options such as