Why Microsoft ever thought that naming both a version of the operating
system and the Office suite "XP" (except that there was a corporate-wide
insanity that thought that "eXPerience" was somehow clever) is beyond
me. However, that's what they did. Windows XP has nothing to do with
Office XP - you can run Office XP in Windows 98 and Office 97 in Windows
XP (however, you can't run Office 98 in Windows 98, since Office 98 is a
Mac-only version).

One alternative to buying OfficeXP is to use OpenOffice:

http://openoffice.org

which is a free product that is still under development. It does a
great job for basic spreadsheets, but doesn't have the programmability
that XL does with VBA. It will both read and write XL-compatible files.

Gnumeric is also a very fine free spreadsheet application that runs on
Linux/Unix computers (including Macintosh). Linux is also free, of
course. It should be available for Windows whenever gtk2.0 is finalized.
Again, the programming is a bit different than XL's VBA, but it has the
advantage of getting more statistics actually correct (and I haven't yet
been able to make it return a negative value for RAND() as XL2003 does).



In article ,
"Tripp Smith" wrote:

I recently purchased an HP computer which has Microsoft
XP installed. I have considerable information stored
from my old computer which are Excel spreadsheets in
the .xls format. I am only able to read these files when
I open them and not work within or save changes in them.
When I contacted HP, they informed me that I needed to
separately purchase an Excel program that allowed me to
work within these files. I'm having a real problem
having spent $2,000 on a new system and then being told
that I have to spend more in order to access my files.
Are there any alternatives?