Windows Vista/Microsoft Word Question

Hello All,

This may sound like a silly question, but I just got a new computer and it has Windows Vista Home Premium pre-loaded on it.

The question is, I'm trying to write out a letter and I can't find Microsoft Word. Please tell me its on the system and that I dont have to buy it as an extra.

If it isn't on the system are there any free word/excel programs anyone can suggest?

Thanking you all in advance.

Cheers
Global

 

Word is a part of Microsoft's Office suite of programs. It is NOT built into ANY versions of Windows. Lots of folks think it is, but it isn't. You do have Word Pad which is a scaled down version of Word. You can also use Open Office for full Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc) compatability. Here's the link for the standard version:
http://www.majorgeeks.com/OpenOffice.org_For_Windows_d3461.html
Pro version: http://www.majorgeeks.com/OxygenOffice_Professional_d5340.html (211mb vs. 120mb and has more features, fonts, clip art, etc)
Both are 100% free and totally interchangeable with MS Office 2000 thru 2007.
There's other Word type programs (free ones) in the Office Tools section here at Major Geeks. Good Luck!

 

Your pc will only have MS Office loaded if the manufacturer/vendor installed it there. Ah, for the good old days, when OEM sellers loaded you down with a ton of good software and only padded the total price a bit. Now they give you demos or nothing at all :-(

Some new pcs have MS Works installed, which is a little bit like Office's chimpanzee ancestor.

I highly recommend OpenOffice, it is totally free open source, and looks and feels very much like MS Office. It has modules for word processing, spreadsheet, database, presentations (powerpoint clone), and more. OpenOffice can open and save to the Microsoft formats (except the new Word 2007 doc format) and some others as well as its own proprietary format.

I love the Writer module because it can export to pdf beautifully, and it even keeps live url links when it does. Sadly, the export to html is not so pretty, it ends up looking like plain text, so MS Word is better for doing "wysiwyg" html documents.

http://www.majorgeeks.com/OpenOffice.org_For_Windows_d3461.html

EDIT ADDED-
dlb, ya beat me to it, I guess I type too slowly

 

I could never get Open office to read any of the MS office 2007 files.

I used OpenOffice with linux, and MSoffice with windows.

 

Correct.

Open Office will not support Office 2007 Open XML file formats until version 2.4, which is slated for a March 2008 release.

Unless you are a Mac user, in which case NeoOffice (Based on Open Office) already does.

 

Just wondering, if you saved a Word 2007 file as a Word 97-2003 document, will OpenOffice read the file?

 

Yes it will, as it saves it in the old MS Office standard.

 

or just use wordpad, built into vista.

windows key + R, type in wordpad (press enter).

Generic yes, but still works.