I'm struggling something fierce with school right now because I don't have Power Point and am required to be able to see each slide in my professor's PPs to get all my notes for my final exam. With PP viewer I can only see them as a "show" and can't change the view to see all the slides.

Buying MS Office is completely out of the question, but someone told me about "Open Office" and I was wondering if it's a safe program suite to install. Safe, in not that it only won't give me any crazy viruses, but won't hijack any of my settings either. I don't want to have to reformat to get rid of it like I did with AOL (not my doing), Norton, or a number of other "safe" programs.

But I'd also like to... I don't know... pass my finals.

I've got it installed with no problem. Never realized, until just now, it was Apache OO though.

Yes, OpenOffice is safe. So is another alternative I like, LibreOffice. I've used both extensively, most recently LibreOffice. Either one will work.

I use Open Office all the time. Apache recently took over stewardship of the suite from Oracle, but for all intents and purposes it should be the same program as before, ie: a compatible alternative to MS Office.