OpenOffice Writer:

OpenOffice’s word processor is called Writer. It has all the usual features that you would expect, plus a few uncommon ones. An example is the type-ahead feature. This examines what you've entered so far and then does its best to guess the rest of the word you're typing. If you are a proficient typist, you won't need this, but for slower typists this is a welcome feature. Over time, it builds up a list of the words you use. This is a valuable feature, indeed.

The included Wizards, while not as extensive as the ones included with Microsoft Office 2003, are sufficient for a SOHO setup. Also, the final release is expected to have more Wizards included. Writer also includes the expected range of auto correct and auto text features to clean up your work. It politely pops up a light bulb in the corner of the screen each time it does this, which isn't as effective as the smart icons used by Microsoft Office, but serves the purpose.

Compatibility with Microsoft Word is excellent, and is in fact even better than the previous version. OpenOffice now includes support for Auto Shapes and Nested Tables, which will improve compatibility. We opened many Word documents created by different versions of Word and OpenOffice opened each one perfectly. Only one document had a small alignment mix up, which was easily fixed. Out of forty or so documents, that's a pretty good ratio. In fact, even Microsoft Office has compatibility problems with older versions.

Previous versions of OpenOffice were criticized for not including a proper word count feature. It was not possible to do word counts of a selected block of text. This has been fixed in version 2.0, with standard word count features being added, and the word count feature being moved to the Tools menu.

The PDF export feature is beefed up, allowing you to choose only certain pages of a document, changing the compression options for graphics, and changing the format in case you are exporting a form.

Writer is a very usable product. Unless you are using some esoteric features of Microsoft Office, or you have extremely complex documents that do not render properly in OpenOffice, you can use it for all your normal needs.

OpenOffice Impress:

In the presentation program, you do not have many templates to choose from. This may change with the release of the final version, but as of now, the range of templates on offer is under whelming and probably best avoided. The New Presentation Wizard does help in organizing your thoughts and sets common parameters such as transitions and speeds before you start. Impress also lets you save your presentation as flash animations, which is extremely useful for putting up on a website. Impress has a new presentation engine, which makes it easier to use.

Impress is not as polished as Powerpoint, but is very capable nevertheless. The Flash import feature may turn out to be a great help to company webmasters. If you are used to using all the bells and whistles of Powerpoint, then you will probably feel limited by Impress, but if your needs are simpler, such as the occasional presentation, Impress is perfectly capable of handling them.

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