If you're not really happy with using Microsoft Office, you'll be glad to know there's an alternative that includes all the standard office tools, is fully compatible with Microsoft standard formats and costs half the price.

StarOffice is a nicely designed productivity suite that features all the utilities you may need for your daily work tasks. Whether you're producing a text document, a presentation, a spreadsheet or a professional layout, StarOffice can lend you a hand. The suite also includes tools to work with databases and mathematical formulae.

The suite opens up with a menu where you can select the app you want to run, and also places an icon in the system tray for quick access. Like I said, it's fully compatible with Microsoft documents, meaning you can open, edit and save Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Access files, among others. What's more, StarOffice also features integrated PDF export capability, which lets you save files as PDF.

StarOffice includes loads of document templates to get you started and wizards to help you crate special documents such as faxes, presentations or even web pages.

StarOffice proves that there's life beyond Microsoft, by providing you with a feature-rich productivity suite with apps to create documents, spreadsheets, presentations and more.