[Straight Vermonter]

Oracle's Open Office suite is a fairly respectable word processing and spreadsheet (among other things) which doesn't require a license fee. They may be a little more clunky to work with than the Word and Excel equivalents, but that is mainly a matter of getting used to them.

I think it is harder for those of us who have a decade of more of using Office than for a new learner. My sons have always used OpenOffice and can use it effortlessly. I still look for things in OpenOffice where I remember them being years earlier in Office.

[Vigilanteman]

It may also be worth taking a look at LibreOffice (Post #5) as some of the things on their skinny look like it might even be better than Oracle.