re Speech recognition software

Soory I seem to have confused people -  what I want to do is read large 
quantities of letters  to the computer  and for it to produce me a text 
file so that the contents of the letters can be shared amongst the 
family. I know there is a commercial program - Dragon naturally Speaking 
that does this , it also has a lot of othher bells and whistles that I 
don't need , so I was hoping there might be a simple shareware version.

So I want to "dictate" to my computer and have it give me a text file of 
some description.

Thanks to those who have answered , I'm looking into the later versions 
of Word to see if they would serve, I am using office 97 which isn't.

Anne