OpenOffice 1.1.4

There isn't much in the way of wizards in the current release. Instead, you have a small selection of templates that includes faxes, business cards and expense claim forms. Of more interest to creative users will be the Gallery, which includes a wide range of images for use in documents, and sounds for dropping into web pages and presentations. It also includes the expected range of autocorrect and auto text features to knock your work into shape and insert commonly used text strings whenever you type an abbreviation. 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 does at least let you do a quick Undo before you've typed on and committed yourself to a lengthy backtrack.

Compatibility with Microsoft Word is excellent, with OpenOffice coming closer than any other application to a perfect rendering of our test document. Page margins were correctly interpreted, framed sidebar text remained locked in place and a table-based, annotated screen grab was only slightly overwritten by the keyed captions to each side. Although it straightened our rotated image, it did manage to import the Word Art, which was a surprise.

Presentations

When it comes to Presentations, the range of templates on offer is underwhelming and probably best avoided. However, stepping through the New Presentation Wizard is an effective way to organise your thoughts, and set common parameters such as transitions and speeds before you start. It can be set to automatically advance each slide at a specific interval, and presentations can be exported as Flash files. Combine these features with an embedded commentary and you have the perfect tool for creating online presentations without writing a single line of code. It could also save you a lot of money on buying Macromedia Breeze, which starts at more than £20,000 and, among other things, offers a very similar feature.

Font handling within Presentations is excellent, with superbly anti-aliased results. We were a little disappointed, though, to see that although you can drag out as many guidelines as you want from the horizontal and vertical rulers, frames will only snap to them on resizing if you have the Shift key held down. In itself, this wouldn't be a problem if Shift wasn't the modifier for proportional scaling. As things stand, you could find yourself with wildly oversized text boxes purely for the sake of neatness.

Although there's a dedicated web editor bundled with the suite, the Presentations module is well suited to outputting HTML, with a range of web-focused features, including image map creation. It also includes a variety of display options that should help in gauging the effectiveness of your presentation when output to different media. The greyscale mode, for example, will give some idea how your handouts will look on a laser printer.

Unfortunately it all feels somewhat modular. There's a very definite jump from the slide design workspace to that for writing your presenter notes, and again when switching to the Outline view.

Presentations copes well with PowerPoint imports, recognising our skewed graphic and rendering our Word Art in similar-sized and identically coloured text, which although not perfect is certainly very good. Fade transitions between each slide were unfortunately lost, but are easily replaced, and not as important as a successful import of the slide contents.

Spreadsheet

The last major application is the Spreadsheet. This looks and works very much like Excel, and it uses almost identical formulas, unlike Quattro Pro (part of WordPerfect Office) and Lotus 123, both of which stray from the norm. It also puts almost everything in the same place on menus, so will be familiar to switchers.