For Dummies books are good enough, best way though is to find a helpful soul who will sit down with you. OpenOffice is fine. You can also you the Google or Apple cloud apps – you don’t even need a programme on your computer it all works through your web browser.
To organise what you have it would seem logical to have a few columns
Date, Item, Income, Expense
eg 11/6/2014, Inner tube, blank, £3 – the blank is in the income column as the item is an expense
You could add a category (leisure, household, savings etc)
The trick will be how you analyse the data – there is an Excel tool called Data Table which will be useful for you – you can use it to see how much you’ve spent in a given month, how much on a given category etc