Open office is compatible with MS office. You can save documents in .doc or .docx format. OO Writer corresponds to word and Calc corresponds to excel.
If all your friend needs is a word processor they might try wordpad which is a part of windows. It's a pretty good word processor without all the bells and whistles of word.

Thanks, Bob. He's using Wordpad now, but it's a pain in the neck. As far as I can tell (and my experience with Wordpad is minimal, although I've done some web searches for info) there is very little formatting (tables, for example; I know table objects can be inserted, but that seems like a pain) and no ability to sort, which he needs. A few more bells and whistles would be nice.

I use it and have no issues with it, in fact it has on one occasion saved an Excel document that Excel could not open. (Client very relieved). However, depending on the individual, it may not live up to MS Office's ability if you are using the more sophisticated features of their product. For "general purpose suite" use however, it does just fine. It's free so download it and try it, if it doesn't live up to your expectations, it's easily deleted.

If only word processing is needed why not consider Abiword, linked below.

Here is a link that might be useful: Abiword

owbist, do you like Abiword better than OpenOffice for any reason?

My friend is not very savvy (yet) about any of this so will not miss sophisticated features. Right now he's perfectly happy with WordPad but is finding out that there are other things that can be done (um, like sorts) and is intrigued. I'd like to introduce him to a more functional pkg., but he'll run the other way if it's too involved.

Abiword has been around a few years and gets promoted as a viable program occasionally. I have MS Office so have not tried it nor given any serious consideration to Open Office. It just seems silly to download such a huge program as OO if a word processor is all the is needed.

Why not have him try Abiword? If he does not like it the process to remove it is very easy. Same with Open Office, try then decide if it suits the purpose. Nothing lost only a little time perhaps.

AbiWord is a good alternative for just WP. Invariably however, there will come a time when you will likely want a spreadsheet or OLE functionality for some project. OpenOffice retains conventional toolbars (some folks do not appreciate the ribbon on Office 2007) and by today's standards, isn't really that large.

I use only open office now, and even my husband has it on his laptop, he uses spreadsheets daily in his work and was worried his MS Office stuff would not work with OO but he was happily surprised when it all worked fine.
You do have to select to save your items in a format that MS office uses so when I save a document I use the drop down menu and select to save it in .doc format not in the default Open Office format.

If he does use excel or power point or other programs normally in MS Office then having the open office suite is what he would need. Open office will open all of those. I use it to open a lot of power point files I get in email.