OpenOffice has been around now for an amazing 20 years, and version three has been in the making for three of them. It’s a collection of five core applications (six if you count the Formula tool) and it’s available in Windows, Linux and now Mac OS X versions.

These applications are almost direct mirrors of those in Microsoft Office. Where Office has Word, OpenOffice has Writer, and the counterpart to Excel is Calc. The trouble is that where once OpenOffice looked like a direct copy of Office, it’s now far behind.

Writer, for instance, still looks like Word did about three versions ago. On the face of it, it does all the same things, offering customisable text styles, multicolumn layouts, good graphics handling, auto text formatting, and now the ability to open Office 2007 .docx files directly.

Academic and technical authors will also be impressed by the fact that, like Word, it supports tables of contents, indices and cross-referencing.

But there are some rough edges. Writer’s Styles and Formatting and Navigator panels are effective but look crude. And Writer doesn’t even attempt to match Word’s range of document templates or its clip-art collection.

It would also be unwise to rely too heavily on the .docx format compatibility. It might work well enough with straightforward documents, but it made a pig’s ear of a more elaborate Word 2007 newsletter layout we tried.

On the other hand, Writer handled revisions and author comments well, and it now displays them as colour-coded notes in the margin.

Calc is the OpenOffice rival to Excel, and it’s a similar story here. In terms of raw functionality, it’s a real match for Excel, but without the polish, the content and the hand-holding for beginners.

Like Excel, Calc can handle multiple worksheets, manage data in lists with super-efficient AutoFilters for sorting and filtering your data, and it can create many different types of charts.

Calc does everything you need of a spreadsheet on a technical front, and will open Excel 2007 files directly – although you may need to iron out some glitches with named cells and references plus other minor cell-formatting and display issues.

It’s when you create a chart, though, that you encounter the gulf in visual presentation between OpenOffice 3 and Office 2007. Calc’s charts are clear but basic, with graphics that aren’t even anti-aliased.

In this version, though, they do now include error bars, regression equations and correlation co-efficients. The maximum number of columns in a worksheet has been increased from 256 to 1024, and there’s a new Solver tool. There’s no doubting Calc’s technical depth and sophistication, but its visual presentation is primitive.

This lack of graphical finesse becomes most obvious when you use the Impress application to create a presentation. The standard installation includes just two templates, although many more are available for download. The point here is that while you can do almost everything in Impress that you can in PowerPoint, you’ll have to work harder to find a smart visual style and sophisticated clip-art to carry it off.

Impress does a good job of mimicking PowerPoint’s tools, however, right down to the array of custom slide layouts and animation tools, which even include custom motion paths for controlling object movement.

The Draw program offers a standalone tool for preparing and editing vector graphics to use in Writer, Calc and Impress files. It’s technically very proficient, offering full bezier tools, ‘sticky’ connectors and dimension lines for annotating plans and blueprints.

It supports object transparency, too, but doesn’t anti-alias the display – an odd mixture of the modern and the archaic.

What is exciting about OpenOffice is that it includes a full-blown relational database tool. The equivalent in Office is Access, but this is available only in the more expensive configurations.

If you want to learn about relational databases, here’s a free application to do it, though in true OpenOffice style it delivers all the tools in a straightforward no-frills way.

Here at PC Authority we’ve always rated OpenOffice highly as a free alternative to Microsoft Office. But while version 3 continues that tradition, the cracks are beginning to show, and visually it’s now the poor relation.

That may not matter in technical and academic circles, but in the business world appearances count, and while Office 2007 can make anyone look like a pro in minutes, with OpenOffice you risk looking like an amateur instead.