Once upon a time, MicrosoftCorporation decided that they could sell more crap that people didn't need if they bundled up their 'office applications' (word processor, spreadsheet, personal DataBase, presentaton package etc) together.

Thus Microsoft Office was born, and now you can hardly buy or use the components separately.

Of course, cloning this idea was high on the list of everyone, and now we have StarOffice, OpenOffice.org, KOffice, GOBE Productive etc.

Thankfully there are still a few people out there who do it the old fashioned (UNIX) way of one tool that does the job for one task - AbiWord and Gnumeric spring to mind.