With a licence agreement of barely 100 words and a price tag of absolutely zero, it's surprising that OpenOffice hasn't enjoyed more success. Actually, scratch that; as good as the previous version was, there were unhelpful compatibility issues with the market-dominant Microsoft Office that have slowed its growth.

However, with the removal of a good deal of those obstacles in this fresh, full version 2.0 release, there must be some suits at Microsoft's headquarters that are getting suitably hot under the collar.

There's no pretence to what OpenOffice tries to do, but it does it well. The suite's featured components are a word processor (Writer), a database (Base), a spreadsheet (Calc), a vector drawing tool (Draw) and a mathematical function creator (Math).

For those who've never used OpenOffice before, it's fair to say you're in for a shock. It's an astonishingly well-featured office suite, and while it doesn't match the Microsoft equivalents right down the line, there's ample here to satiate 95 percent of office suite users.

You simply have no right to expect so much, done so well, for free. The reason you get what you do is that this is that this represents the open source software movement at its finest, although its focus is inevitably more on recreating what Microsoft offers than the suite having a full identity of its own.

It deals with Microsoft proprietary files quite well, and while we experienced problems bringing in macro-laden files from Excel, and table-infested documents from Word, on the whole it talks to Microsoft Office - and several other suites - with real ease. XML support is integrated too, and OpenOffice comes with a few of its own proprietary file formats. PDF output is also supported and very welcome indeed.

Right across the board the tools here are impressive. Both Writer and Calc are very easy to use and have enough depth and power to suit all but the most intensive user. Even Base is a lot easier than it was in its earlier incarnation, and the suite as a whole benefits as a result. What's more, given the dedication of the contributors to the OpenOffice project, this is one office suite that's developing, improving and evolving all the time.

There are problems and omissions, however. If you do happen to get stuck, as with most open source projects you're faced with a minefield of documentation rather than quick answers. Likewise, there's no instant help at the end of a phone line, and nothing other than the admittedly generous goodwill of the user community to get you out of a pickle.

But make no mistake, OpenOffice.org 2 is ample proof that sometimes it is possible to get something very good for no charge at all. It may not be the equal of Microsoft Office, and it may lack the gamut of features that Corel's latest WordPerfect suite offers, but this is still a major league bargain.

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Website: http://OpenOffice.org

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