OpenOffice

I've refused, all these years, to pay the outrageous price Mr. Gates charges for Excel, using instead the free spreadsheet included in the OpenOffice suite, but I almost caved in yesterday. I had downloaded wind speed data from NOAA (see below) in .txt format and "copy-paste"d it into an OpenOffice spreadsheet only to find that OpenOffice didn't have an easy way to convert ("parse") text into numbers. A little Googling, however, revealed that OpenOffice has advanced to version 2.4 and I was still using 2.0. And 2.4 does support parsing. Yippee! The installation file is enormous, but so far OO has been working beautifully. I may even disinstall Word!