In FOSS world, there are some alternatives for replacing Microsoft Word. The famous one is OpenOffice.org Writer, a part of OpenOffice.org office suite. For those KDE fanboys, there is KWord, part of KOffice office suite. Now, for Gtk+ fans, they have Abiword, a standalone word processor made by Abisource community. Note: these alternatives actually cross-platform software, you can use them in GNU/Linux, Windows, and MacOS X.
There are some web applications that can be used, such as Google’s approach with Google Docs and Zoho Writer. They also provide collaboration service beside word processing function. Yesterday, Abiword has also launched their new service, called Abicollab. I have tried it and it was awesome. One drawback though, you must have Abiword installed in you system for using this service.
To learn how to use the service, one of Abiword developer has posted a tutorial in his blog. The tutorial will be available in a couple of parts. You can find them here:
Enjoy 
