If you work with the Internet much you've probably already heard of open source software. If not, you are in for a treat! Open source software is usually free and is not owned by one company so there aren't proprietary issues involved.
I've used OpenOffice at work and home and other then not being compatible with Works for Windows (the home version of MS Office) it works great. It includes a word processor (like Word), database (like Access), spreadsheet (like Excel), drawing, and presentation (like PowerPoint). One of my favorite features of OpenOffice's Writer is that you can save documents into PDF format. That is both a convenience and a money saver! OpenOffice, while being open source, still has some oversight by Oracle. For small businesses that expect to grow, OpenOffice has more capability for scaling up because Oracle offers a business version of the suite that includes commercial support for $49.95 per computer.
LibreOffice is newer and is strictly an open community open source project. But it has more language options (as in foreign languages) than OpenOffice. See this extensive review for specific details about both.
The upshot for me is that either one would be good enough for now. Since my start-up is probably going to take at least a couple of years to get going, it's particularly important to keep my costs down. I imagine that's true for many start-ups. I can always switch to the commercial version of OpenOffice or MS Office when the business is running a significant profit.
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