I've said it before elsewhere -- it's not that hard to obtain a copy of MS Office without paying for it. But isn't it better to use and support open source products? There are all sorts of long-term benefits to doing so.

In my previous job, the IT monkeys were so in love with Microsoft that, as one monkey put it, "If Microsoft made a toilet paper, we'd buy it." This philosophy had terrible effects on our productivity. Because they insisted on using Active Directory for everything, our network needed hours of downtime every week. Bad mojo.

Open source software. There is a better way.