We seem to try every way we can to make you addicted to expensive commercial software. University computer rooms offer only windows software. We buy licenses for expensive commercial software like Adobe Distiller, S Plus, Scientific Workplace. Then we bombard you by email and on websites with microsoft office files, excel spreadsheets, etc, that you can only open if you have expensive microsoft office products. By the time you graduate you are so heavily hooked on expensive commercial software that you will unthinkingly pour thousands of dollars into software that you don't need. I would strongly encourage you not to use microsoft. My reason is not that it doesn't work. The operating system seems perfectly good. The problem with it is that it is deliberately disabled. One possible reason is because of commercial agreements with other software companies. For example, microsoft word is the only word processor that does not have a built in way to produce pdf files. To create pdf files from your word documents, you need to buy an expensive version of acrobat distiller from Adobe. If you use windows, don't use microsoft word (use openoffice - see below) unless you have an unlimited budget for software. If you plan to write research papers of any kind use latex to produce your typeset documents.

Here is a list of free open source packages that will do all of the work that you need to do as an economist

These are the programs I have found most useful. An exhaustive list of opensoure applications is available at http://www.american.edu/econ/notes/soft.htm.