We’ve always been impressed by OpenOffice. Not because it’s better than Microsoft Office – it isn’t. Not because it’s better looking than Microsoft Office, either. Again, it isn’t. What’s kept us hooked over the last few years, as it’s crept to the point where the two are now all but neck and neck on features, is the extraordinary value for money. It’s completely free.

OpenOffice runs on Windows, Linux and Solaris, and comprises the usual raft of office applications, with a word processor (Writer), spreadsheet (Calc) and presentation module (Impress) at the fore, backed up by database and drawing tools. All can import Microsoftformatted files to an impressive degree, and can be set to export in Microsoft native formats for use in mixed-suite environments.

This latest release has been a while in the making, so we were keen to see how it compared with the previous edition as well as the commercial StarOffice, designed for larger organisations.


Writer
Writer, along with Calc, is inevitably what people will use most. To test compatibility, we loaded up a complex Word 2000 marketing document, making full use of Microsoft Word’s formatting options, with complex composite images made up from tiled GIFs overlaid by markers, shaded boxes and a wide range of font and paragraph styles.

Without exception, Writer picked them all up, perfectly mimicking the Word original and placing them all in line – something we’ve never seen before. The only difference was the way Writer showed us the edges of image frames, which by default are invisible in Word, and isn’t a problem as they won’t print.

It didn’t do quite so well when we tested more esoteric formatting options in a document of our own creation. A rotated JPEG was straightened, pushing down some of the text that should have appeared beside it, while a vector image had lost its colouring. An embedded chart was properly rendered, though, and our garish sample of WordArt was rendered in the same colours and size in Writer as Word, although the edges of the characters were more jagged in OpenOffice’s version.

However, its WordArt equivalent – which it calls Fontwork – is far more accomplished, with a dedicated 3D panel giving you access to a raft of extrusion options, and even control over lighting from any one of eight directions.

What we were most impressed by though, were the built-in image-editing tools. Certainly, they won’t put Photoshop out of work, but when unleashed on a photo they let you set transparency and apply a range of surprisingly sophisticated filters. The former option will be useful if you want to reduce the impact of an image you’re setting under text, while the latter lets you sharpen blurred images, blur sharp ones, tweak individual colour channels and even remove noise in badly compressed snaps. And that’s before you get into the less tasteful options.

We were pleased to see that OpenOffice has moved the Wordcount option from a subsection of the file menu, where it always looked out of place. Also impressive is the revamped Mail merge, although it still lags behind Microsoft Office for simplicity.


Calc
The spreadsheet has been beefed up, now holding twice as many rows as it once did (now 65,536 to match Excel), but its charting tools could still do better. If you’re starting graphs from scratch, there’s no cause for complaint. But if you're importing a graph from Excel, we found that the most extreme value on the Y-axis was never high enough to stop it shearing off the top of the highest peak. Unfortunately, this spoiled an otherwise excellent effort that saw the graph retain the smooth curves we had set in Excel – lesser suites opt for simple lines at angles to one another.

Likewise, while it did put our chart on a dedicated page, it wasn’t an unlined charting page like the ones in Excel, but an emptyboxed spreadsheet.

Conditional formatting holds greater promise. We set up a simple spreadsheet in Excel that would switch the colour of negative figures to red. Opening it in Calc brought forth no surprises. Whether or not you like the way in which you have to establish new formatting rules when doing this from scratch, though, depends on how you feel about style sheets. Whereas Excel presents you with a simple, unified dialog combining a field into which you enter your condition with a standard font and colour picker to define the styling, Calc expects you to have first set up the style you want to use in the Styles and Formatting palette. This is good because it ensures well-thought-out results that will present well when printed alongside other spreadsheets using the same styles, but at the same time it’s inconvenient, as you have to look at more than one palette to define the conditional formatting you want to apply.

Grouped cells import well, and we actually prefer Calc’s implementation to Excel. Where the latter puts the expansion and contraction button for revealing hidden cells in the margin of the last column or row in the group, Calc places it alongside the first. Excel’s implementation lines up your expansion point with the first exposed cell outside of your defined group, which is illogical, whereas Calc very clearly indicates the point at which the group stops as being the border between the last cell in the group and the first cell outside of it. This comes into its own where you have positioned two grouped sets beside each other, in which case with Excel you’re more inclined to open the wrong one.

We were also highly impressed by the Function Wizard, which is more extensive than that provided by Excel, and once you’ve picked your function acronym it matches Excel’s walkthroughs.