So speaking of free products for your computer there is Open Source (this means free) Word Processing, Spreadsheet and Presentation sotware called OpenOffice and it’s no where near as daunting to install as Linux is. OpenOffice is available for Windows and Linux the latest Alpha of the Macintosh version was just released yesterday. The Macintosh version is called NeoOffice 2.0 Alpha 4 (for OS X 10.3 or better) (Alpha means it’s still in testing).
By default it’s in English but 53 other language packs are available. It’s still an Alpha release (testing) but you can still get version 1.22 (but 1.22 doesn’t work on the Intel Macs). There is an actual version of generic Open Office for Mac but it requires X11 installed (which makes the process way more complicated) and it’s not as seamless IMHO. I’ve used this and recommend it to most of my Mac friends.
