I have Office 2003. I don't plan on buying Office 2010. The only thing I use in Office is Word. I have used Excel about twice. I have nothing to spread on a spreadsheet anymore so I don't use it. PowerPoint's nice if you're trying to impress some girl or guy. Since I'm a guy I don't want to impress guys - and I'm too old to worry about impressing girls - well sometimes. Anyway...

But I really don't like Word too much - it keeps correcting my grammar. Can you imagine the nerve? So when I stumbled on Jarte the other day, I was impressed. It leaved my grammar alone and I was free to express myself good. I mean all those stupid grammar rules? Who need those?

OK, I'm getting carried away here, you just care about what it is, what it does and where to get it. What you really care about --because you're cheap -- is that it's free. But free is not good enough for you, is it? You want cheap and you want good. Cheap and good are hard to find. Trust me.

Jarte is a Windows word processor that can read and save your word processing gems in Word format which is .doc or .docx depending on the version of MS Office you spent $400 to buy. I would have said $400 for, but that would have been ending a sentence with a preposition and Word doesn't like that - plus $400 for sounds kind of clumsy.

So what does Jarte do? Duh! It's a word processor. If you don't know what a word processor is, you don't need one. Trust me on that. Here's a short list of features. If you like these features, great, if not, go plunk down $400 for MS Office, I don't care!

• Fully compatible with Windows Vista

• Tabbed interface to provide easy access to open documents

• Opens files with file extension RTF, file extension DOC, and file extension DOCX (new default format in Word 2007)

• Fast start up

• Compact screen size

• Hot Connect lets you use Jarte with other programs

• Optional "Clickless Operation" feature greatly reduces clicking

• Can be run directly from a pluggable USB flash drive

• High quality spell checker with custom user dictionary

• Included spelling dictionaries: English (American, British, & Canadian), Spanish, French, German, Italian, and Dutch

• Link to, or import, your existing custom Word spelling dictionaries

• Support for templates

• Export to HTML or PDF

• Single click bookmarking and bookmark navigation

• Send documents via e-mail

• Full drag and drop file support

• Instant access to recently opened documents and folders

• Instant access to documents and folders designated as favorites

• Adjustable document zoom

• Detailed Help documentation

If you're the kind of person who spent $400 for MS Office and realize now you could have bought a whole computer for that much money, and you feel bilked;  feel bilked no more. In about 4 months MS Office 2010 will make all your old documents obsolete and you'll have a chance to tell Microsoft where to place Office 2010. Not really. I don't know if MS Office 2010 will render your old documents obsolete. They'll probably have converters to convert MS Office 2003 docs into MS Office 2010 docs - and another converter to convert them into MS Office 2007 or whatever it's called. You'll be converting the converted ad nauseum - they really want you to plunk down $400 and avoid all the conversions.

If you're tired of reading my screed and just want the darn word processor - or if you want to learn more about Jarte - or if you'd like to download it just to get me to shut up, please visit this page. Jarte is cheap. Jarte is good. Jarte does what a word processor should. It's our freeware pick of the week and you know what that means!

I'm tired of typing.