First of all, I am not saying you are wrong to be using Microsoft Works rather than Microsoft Word. I'm sure Microsoft Works came with your computer and it's definitely a good thing to use free stuff if it will get you by. Secondly, I have never actually used Microsoft Works because it isn't what most of the world runs on. Most of the world uses Microsoft Word so if you create a document and decide at a later date that you want to send it to someone else, it is wise that they be able to open it with Microsoft Word.

My beef with Microsoft Works is that I have had people who send me Microsoft Works files that they have created for important projects that we were working on together. It was a lot of work to figure out how to make Microsoft Word open their Microsoft Works files. Many people who aren't interested in doing research to get their computer to open a file would have been much more frustrated than I was. While researching your problem though, I found that Microsoft works is capable of saving a document as a Microsoft Word file so that after saving it you could send it to anyone who has Microsoft Word and they could easily open the file. Not only that, but the method of saving it as a Microsoft Word document is not any more difficult than it would be if you were going to do the same thing in OpenOffice. So if the only reason that you're considering switching to OpenOffice is because you would be compatible with people who have Microsoft Word, I have discovered that is a poor reason to switch and I should not have encouraged you to switch for that reason. The process of saving as a Microsoft Word document is the same in both OpenOffice and Microsoft Works.

You just hit File, Save As (don't hit just save, make sure you hit Save As) and then you will be presented with a box to type the file name in so that you can remember what the document was for. Right below that box you will see something that will say "Save as type"  Click on the drop-down arrow. When I do this in OpenOffice, the one that I select so that other people can easily read my document is "Microsoft Word 97/2000/XP (.doc)". The "(.doc)" part is the important part. If you want to save a document in Works that is compatible with Word, you need to find the option in your "Save as type" box that ends with (.doc).

Microsoft Works naturally saves a file as a (.wps) file. Open Office naturally saves as a (.odt) file. Microsoft Word naturally saves a file as a (.doc) file. I'm sure there are other office suites that naturally save as some other file type. The reason it's good to save it as a .doc file is because Microsoft Word has been the standard for so long that pretty much any word processing software that you come across will be able to open a standard Microsoft Word file. This means that if you go through the process that I recommended and save your documents as a (.doc) file with either Microsoft Works or Open Office, pretty much anyone should be able to read the documents that you create.

You said that a one time donation is better than a monthly fee and I am confused by this statement. I hope that you have not accidently gone to some site that is going to charge you money to give you some OpenOffice look a like software. If you go to http://www.openoffice.org/ (if you decide to type it in instead of click on my link, make sure you type .org instead of .com) the OpenOffice homepage will come up. Click on "I want to download OpenOffice.org". Then click "Download Now!".

This is a very large file, about 142 MB. On my connection (which is a pretty slow cellular connection) this would take over 5 hours so I would just start the download and walk away and do something else. On your connection, if you have dialup, it may be worse than that. Back when we had dialup, this kind of a download would have taken us a full day because we were not even able to connect at full dialup speeds. In my opinion, having OpenOffice would be worth letting your computer run for several days to download a file. Hopefully you have a high speed connection or know somone who does though.

If you know someone who has a high speed connection, they should be able to make short work of the download (probably less than half an hour). After that they could transfer it to a USB storage device for you so that you could take it home and transfer it from the storage device to your computer so that you could install it.

If none of these are options for you, then your last resort could be to buy the CD off of the internet. I'm sure there are plenty of places that sell it for maybe 5 dollars just to cover the cost of them making the CD off of the download that they had and then tacking on a bit for shipping and handling fees.

Up above you asked if OpenOffice could read your Microsoft Works documents. There are ways around it but they are complicated, so the short answer for most people is no, it cannot (which is another reason to hit "Save As" every time you create a document and save it as a (.doc) file so that it will be compatible with other office suites). If you want to be able to read any of the documents that you have saved as a (.wps) file type (which is probably every document that you've ever created with Works), you will have to open those documents with Works and then go through the process I described to save them as a (.doc) file. Then you could open the new file that is created with either Word or OpenOffice.

Another option would be to go to http://download.novell.com/Download?buildid=uozWMoU4UPQ~ and download their modified version of OpenOffice. My understanding is that Novell has modified their version of OpenOffice so that it can natively open Microsoft Works files. I have not downloaded it to try it but I have read on various computer forums from people who have said that they've tried it and it works. You would have to create an account with Novell (much like the process you went through to create an account so that you could post on this site I would assume) before you can download from them. I have not tried any of that, so you're on your own there. I guess I could give it a try if you wanted to go that route and were having problems. If you don't want to go that route though, I don't really have a desire to do it for my own benefit.