Don't Buy Office-- Word Processing for FREE

Okay so maybe you will need MS office, but there are a lot of new uses of Ajax technology out there that are bringing the functionality of word processing applications to the web... and for free. I wouldn't write necessarily my great american novel with one of these things (though they look like they have some impressive advanced features) but if the most you do is the occasional letter or a kid's essay for school then you might want to check these out.

Best of all you don't need to install it so you can use them from any computer. I haven't had the chance to play with either of them but they come pretty highly recommended from pundits of the web industry.

Writely is owned by google and is in beta. You can load from and save to your desktop so you don't have to worry about storing your data online. It's currently closed for new signups while they move it to google's server. You'll even be able to use it to compose blog posts.

Ajax Write just lanched today and reminded me to post about this. It requires firefox with java and is still in beta.