Currently, Microsoft Word (MS Word) is the most popular word processing software. Another program is WordPerfect by the Corel Corporation. This product is still in use, and its niche market is the legal profession, given its built-in support for legal templates. While Microsoft Word and Word Perfect are commercial software, a third program, Writer, which is part of OpenOffice by Apache, is open source and can be downloaded and used free of charge. Finally, there is Pages, which is part of iWork by Apple.

Although there are minor differences found among the different word processing software programs, they all accomplish pretty much the same thing, and the one you use is partly a matter of personal preference. However, it is also important to consider what type of software the people you normally collaborate with use. In many cases, people within the same organization will use the same software. This makes it easier to share and work on the same document together.

That said, Word processing applications allow you to change formats. Let's say a colleague created a file in iWork; they can save that document into a Doc or DocX file so you can open it in Microsoft Word.