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It’s partly a tribute to how popular Word and Excel have become that the interfaces of Open Office’s equivalents look so similar when you first open them up. Indeed, launch Writer and you could be forgiven for thinking you’d strayed into Word instead. The menus along the top of the screen and their contents, many of the toolbar buttons and the vast majority of the basic functions of Writer are all but identical to Word.

Delving deeper into the menus will reveal differences between the two programs, but anyone who has used a version of Microsoft Word should be able to quickly start creating documents in Writer without needing to dig through the help files.

Feature for feature, Writer matches its Microsoft counterpart. Macros, charts, tables and images are all dealt with just as capably, and even the shortcuts used to activate them are largely the same. Even the most complex Word documents containing charts and images can be opened and edited by Writer.

Writer isn’t limited to mimicking Word, though, and in some areas it comfor tably eclipses Microsoft’s program. Open the File menu and you’ll notice the Export as PDF option. This handy feature makes it easy to create a document that can be viewed and printed correctly on just about any computer.

Another good thing in Writer is its image-editing abilities. While Word has a Picture toolbar, with the ability to alter brightness and contrast and adjust colour levels, the toolbar of the same name in Writer can do much more. It can’t take the place of a dedicated image-editing program, but it does allow for far more control than you might expect from a word processor.

American English
Writer comes with a number of wizards to help set up new documents, but the way this works is rather different to Word. While Microsoft’s word processor lets you select a preset document from a wide variety of examples when the program is first launched, Writer takes you straight to a blank document. If you want to work from a wizard, click the File menu and choose the Wizards option.

It has to be said, though, when compared to Word, the limited room for customisation in Writer’s sample documents can be disappointing. Annoyingly, the only choice in the language and region options is “English (US)”, and this American bias is also reflected in the layout of the documents: address sections include space for a ZIP code, for example.

There are other areas in which Writer can’t match the depth of Word. Style sheets, for example, are present and work in a similar way to Microsoft’s program, but there aren’t nearly as many. This is not a big problem, though, considering that everyday functions such as lists, copying and pasting, tables and images work perfectly.

Click here for our step-by-step guide to getting started in Open Office Writer

It all adds up
Open Office’s spreadsheet program sells itself a little short with the name Calc, which makes it sound like a simple calculator tool. In fact, it’s an extremely powerful program. As with Writer, the visual similarity between Calc and Excel should quieten any initial doubts after opening it up. Icons are labelled in the same way as Excel, the formula bar is present and correct and the menus all look and feel familiar. Look a little deeper and the pleasant surprises continue. Excel is a staggeringly complex and powerful program, but Calc manages to keep pace in most areas.

Spreadsheets often contain more than just lists of information: many include formulae, tables and charts as well. This makes Calc’s job harder, as it needs to be able to display any of these that have been created in Microsoft Excel.