Labs

Noticing that its rival Microsoft had the office software market tightly sewn up, the software giant Sun decided to compete in a novel way: by releasing its StarOffice software free of charge. And hurrah to that, we love free stuff. You can still buy StarOffice (currently in version 8) from Sun if you want a businesslike software licence with tech support and so on, but meanwhile OpenOffice is being developed in parallel as an open source project, and anyone can download the current version. Incidentally, although it's officially titled OpenOffice.org for legal reasons, everyone just calls it OpenOffice.

Often, if someone offers you something for nowt, there's a catch: either it's rubbish, or they want you to sit through a load of adverts or sign up to a crap broadband service until 2030. Not this time, though. OpenOffice is completely and properly free, and really rather good. It consists of a word processor, a spreadsheet, a drawing program, a database, a presentation program, and a program for doing stuff with mathematical formulae (open source software tends to be geek-friendly). Even if you had to pay for it, that would be a pretty impressive list, so getting it all for nothing is absolutely cracking.

OpenOffice Writer

The word processor, Writer, performed well in our tests. It found all the spelling errors in our imported Word document, without us having to manually run the spellchecker. The macro function worked well, too, allowing us to record and play a macro that automatically created the outline for a letter. And the word count was able to count not only the entire document but also a highlighted section of text. Just like Microsoft Word, Writer allows you to apply extensive formatting, providing plenty of fonts and around 20 text styles (heading 1, heading 2 and so on) to start you off. It can also painlessly create a table of contents and index for your document.

OpenOffice Calc

The spreadsheet, Calc, is also good. It handled both basic and more complex maths functions and formula well. The only major thing it couldn't do as well as Excel was convert one unit of measurement into another. Like the other programs here, it can work with its equivalent Microsoft file format, in this case .xls (though not the new .xlsx). Unlike Corel Quattro, it'll even allow you to save to PDF without forcing you to install a default printer

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OpenOffice Impress and Draw

OpenOffice's presentation program is called Impress. It looks and feels a lot like Microsoft PowerPoint (before the 2007 upgrade), albeit with a slightly cleaner interface. It can also work happily with PowerPoint's .ppt files. As well as a good number of templates, Impress comes complete with fancy transitions and other effects that make it possible to achieve a polished and professional look (as long as you don't go overboard with them). As well as saving to the PowerPoint .ppt format, the usual choice for sharing presentations with other users, Impress also exports to PDF and can save presentations as Adobe Flash movies.

You also get a vector drawing program, imaginatively named Draw. This looks as if it has all the ingrediants of a good art program. In practice, it's a pain in the backside. Bézier curves, the tricky but essential foundation of digital drawing, were even more difficult to get to grips with than in other similar software - and at the best of times it's a bit like wrestling a breakdancing eel. On the plus side, like Impress, Draw can export to both PDF and Flash.

OpenOffice Base

Theoretically, OpenOffice's database, Base, can work with Microsoft Access files. In our tests, however, we tried three versions of the same database - one saved as an Access 2000 file, one as an Access 2003 file and one as an Access 2007 file - and Base couldn't open any of them. Only when we exported our database as a DBF file was Base able to open and edit it. The frustrating thing about this was that all our formatting (an input mask and a lookup table, for instance) was lost and we were unable to create relationships between tables in this format.

In other respects, however, Base worked well. It has design and database views, just like Access, and in almost every other way behaves just like a (rather cut-down) version of Microsoft's database.

A star is born

The only unavoidable drawback to using free software is that it doesn't come with the same support and warranty as a commercial package. If this is a worry, for instance if you're going to use it for business and get into more ambitious projects that won't wait while you figure stuff out for yourself, you could always opt for StarOffice. At only £47 it's still cheap for a full office suite, and it comes with support from the mighty Sun Corporation.

Everyone else should download the free version. It feels a little old-fashioned compared to the all-singing, all-dancing Microsoft Office 2007. On the other hand, it comes with an excellent selection of programs and, although not as feature-packed as Office, has most of the tools and functions that most people use most of the time. If you need an office suite for something very specific, you may find it wanting, but typical users will find more than enough here. And at this price, after all, what have you got to lose?