25 Products We Can't Live Without

It's hard not to love an office suite that does everything I need and costs me exactly $0. It's not merely that I'm a tightwad (I am) or that I hate Microsoft (I do). The OpenOffice.org suite simply works. It handles Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files with ease and seamless integration: When I'm in Writer, I can open a spreadsheet or presentation file with a couple of clicks--without sucking up half my system memory or crashing my PC. OpenOffice is not perfect, of course. To send files to non-OpenOffice users, I must convert the documents to something more Microsoft-friendly. The suite has few bells and whistles, too. But if I wanted bells and whistles, I'd get myself a choo-choo train.

--Dan Tynan, Gadget Freak columnist