All of us open source nuts will like to hear this. OpenOffice, a free office suite developed by Sun Microsystems for those not in the know, is now in Beta 2 of the 2.0 release. OO contains pretty much everything one looks for in an Office Suite and has great conversion tools for existing documents. I encourage anyone intimidated by the X-odd hundred dollar price tags of MS Office to at least give it a try. I'm even writing this with OO at this very moment. One of the more noticeable changes is the interface overhaul from 1.x. It looks much more polished since the 1.9 Beta. Although in many environments it could not be a complete replacement, I still consider it an integral part of a standard desktop.