Every day thousands of people take the plunge and start their own home-based businesses, tired of working for "the Man". They've done their research (hopefully) and taken all of the usual steps:
Come up with their Business name
Outlined their business plan
Set Business Goals, etc.
I'm not going into any of those aspects, because they all should have been taken care of.

But starting a business can mean emptying your pockets, draining your bank account and maxing out your credit cards. Here is a way to save some money on the basic productivity software you need to help you keep your office in order and your software budget in check. By using Open Source software, you can save hundreds of dollars and still have all of the necessary computer programs you need to run your small business.

A good Office Suite is obviously a necessity if you plan on writing memos, communicating on your new company letterhead, keeping inventory in a database, or printing up anything without it looking like chicken scratch. The most popular Office program on the market is Microsoft's Office Suite at about $400.00. It is a very nice product, but carries an extremely unattractive price for the startup.

Consider OpenOffice instead (Google for link). Their OpenOffice.org Office suite can be downloaded and used for free. It contains MS Office equivalent programs that handle all types of documents. With it, you get:
Write- a Word Processor like MS Word
Calc- a spreadsheet program like MS Excel
Impress- a presentation program like MS PowerPoint
Draw- a program to produce everything from simple diagrams to dynamic 3D illustrations and special effects
Base- create and modify tables, forms, queries, and reports, either using your own database or Base's own built-in HSQL database engine.

$400+ saved!