Word processing is something that many of us do on personal computers. While Word Pad or Note Pad are just editing text software, Microsoft Office Word, from the Office suite is a more powerful software that allows you to process information and to make changes regarding its format. However, Office is not free package, as much as we would want it to be. But this does not mean we are left out of options regarding word processing software. In fact, there are plenty free versions we can find and download from the internet.

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Open Office

Open Office is pretty popular among users from all over the world, since it has an impressive functionality. It can be used not just for word processing, but also for making graphics, spreadsheets, various presentations and also for creating databases. Available in various languages, it has an extra advantage – it does not require special features from the operating system so it can smoothly run on a lot of common computers. For doing all of the above, Open Office uses a standard format, internationally spread. Plus, it can handle files that have already been written in Office.

You can download the software without paying anything, to use it as much as you want. Thanks to the open development process, you or any other user are free to make complaints, request specific new features and report bugs

Abi Word

Here is another popular software, that can run under any operating system from Windows 2000 to Windows 7 plus Linux. It works on 32 bit and 64 bit as well and supports various formats like .doc and .dox, .rtf and .wps, openoffice.org or HTML web pages.

Users appreciate it for the multitude of useful features: you can format text in many ways, cut and paste, use annotations, highlight and so far.

However, Abi Word has no grammar check tool, even though it will point you the spelling mistakes.  For grammar features, you will have to use a plug in. In addition, if you want to open texts that were saved under the OpenDocument formats, install an extra plug in. But you should have no troubles when saving documents in its own format or as Word files.

Jarte

Probably the greatest deserve of this program is that in comparison with other text processors, it has a bold and unique design.  The menus are elegant and they can automatically drop down when placing the mouse cursor above them, if you want so.  You can choose how the program to look like - the compact layout, the classic layout and the minimal layout.

Jarte will give you a generous offer of options for your texts, from the page layout to the final touches. A cool feature is the one that allows you to check specific words from your document right on Wikipedia, by pressing a button called Encyclopedia. It supports txt, doc, rtf writing formats, it can only read docx and can export text as html or pdf. It works under Windows, from the 98 version to the Windows 7.A portable version is available so you can take Jarte on your USB and use it on no matter what computer.

Other options

The list of free word processor software is much longer than you would expect - Easy Office, IBM Lotus Symphony, UltraPad, Scribus, EditPad Lite, Crypt Edit, WordTabs and so far and so on.

They are generally appreciated not just because they do not cost a penny, but because they are a viable alternative to the expensive ones. Plus, most of them can handle various formats, so you do not have to be worried that others, who have a different software, will not be able to access your files.