Openoffice - a replacement for MS Word?

Are you familiar with Openoffice? I need to advise people who can't save documents in .doc format what they can use as an alternative to MS Word. (i.e. those who bought a new computer when Works would only save in .wps)

Can you just download the Word equivalent, or do you need to download a whole big package? Is it something that can be easily distributed to students on a CD?

Thanks for any info!

OO.org is distributed as the whole package but you can install only the word processing part of it if you like.
Not a very big download ~80MB for the stable 1.1.4 version and ~100MB for the 2.0 beta.

Hi, I began to use the Open Office a year ago and itīs a excelent option to replace MS word. You would try to download the new distribution of OO and see the new features.