Later today Microsoft will announce the price of Office 2010 at the CES show in Las Vegas. But while the software giant is ready to announce the price for customers in the USA, it will take a little longer before people in the rest of the world will be told the price for the new software.

Even without the worldwide details this is good news for business buyers that may have been holding off purchasing additional Office licenses until they could order the new version.

However, students and home users may be more interested in free alternatives such as Google Docs, which provides free web based word processing, spreadsheet, database and presentation graphics tools. An added benefit of the Google Docs approach is that documents are stored on Google servers rather than on the user’s hard disk. This means documents are less likely to be lost because of a hardware failure than if they are stored on home PCs.