BANGALORE, INDIA: The latest version of Open Office comes with a slew of new features for the money conscious office and home users. It provides support for the latest MS Office XML format. Plus, with a look and feel that's similar to MS Office 2003, it becomes a whole lot easier to migrate your docs, spread sheets, etc from MS Office. There have been several enhancements to the different components, whereby most of the older bugs have been fixed. 'Base,' for instance supports MS Access 2007 files.

The word processor, i.e. Writer now includes an easier way to write in multiple languages other than the default language. Earlier, whenever you used multiple languages to write a document, it was very difficult to switch from one language to the other and to tell Writer which spell checker to use. Now you have three easy ways to run spell check on your doc. Just right click on the wrongly spelt word, go to 'Select language for selection' and select the language you want. Here, unlike earlier days when you had to select the word or the para and navigate all the way to the Font tab under Format > Character option, you can now simply switch amongst languages. Backreference has also been introduced in the 'Replace with option,' a useful feature that was earlier available only with the Search option. For example, you can change the data written in mm-dd-yyyy format to yyyy-dd-mm across the whole document. You can also select rectangular area of text in your document, similar to the 'Alt' + Click selection in MS Word.

The comparison
There are some differences between MS Office and OpenOffice. Here we make a comparison. The programmes in 'MS Office Student and Home, (SAH) and OpenOffice are almost the same. But there are some uncommon applications between them, such as MS OneNote in MS Office SAH 2007 and Database (like MS Access) in OpenOffice. Again, MS Access 2007 is not included in MS Office student and home 2007 office suite. While OpenOffice is available for almost all platforms, like, Windows, Linux and Solaris, MS Office is available on Windows only.

MS Office 2007 uses less memory than OpenOffice 2.4. However, there is hardly any time difference between the two to load up (less than 1 sec).

Memory consumption of OpenOffice apps is higher than MS Office. However, there wasn't much difference in the loading times of both

MS Word Vs OpenOffice Writer
Ribbons in MS Office 2007 provide easy navigation across different menu items. OpenOffice Writer supports the DOCX format of latest MS Word but you need to download 'ODF converter-integrator' to read/write a DOCX file. File compatibility issues exist between the two Office suites. We prepared a Word document with graphs; drew a bar chart, type 'Clustered Pyramid,' tables and a box, and when we opened the document in OpenOffice the bar chart and the box didn't appear. But there were no changes as far as texts and tables are concerned.

We saved a file in DOC format in Writer and tried to open it in MS Word, it opened as it was. OpenOffice supports DOC format but MS Word 2007 does not support the ODF format, Plus 'SmartArt' of MS Office 2007 is not supported by Writer.

A document in MS Office 2007 is created with a Word Art and a table and is opened in OO. The table got left aligned and the Word Art didn't appear at all. The text remained as it is.

MS Excel Vs OpenOffice Calc
Compatibility issues are also there when it comes to Excel and Calc. We created a table in MS Excel with one Bar chart and one Pie chart. The table and the charts opened perfectly fine, but the layout of both graphs changed a bit. Then we saved the file in XLS file format and reopened the file in MS Excel 2007. Both graph didn't show up in MS Excel 2007, the chart area was blank. After that, we created a spreadsheet in MS Excel 2007, and opened it Calc. The spreadsheet opened fine.

The compatibility issue is clearly visible in the above screenshot. The cone bar chart appears as 3D bar chart, and sliced pie chart appears as solid pie chart in OO, while the table remains the same

MS PowerPoint Vs OpenOffice Impress
PowerPoint and Impress are also not without the compatibility issues. We created a slide with arrows, similes, text and 3D images, and applied slide design to it. We opened the presentation in Impress, everything appeared fine except the similes which didn't appear at all. Then we inserted a bar chart in our presentation, and saved in PPT format. While opening the presentation in PowerPoint, everything appeared fine, including the bar chart.

From a cost alone perspective, Open Office is of course a better choice because you get so many features for free. But if you're working in an environment where you have to share files with a lot of external people (which you most probably are), then your choice depends upon what everyone else is using. That's because there are incompatibilities between the two, as we just saw.

Bottomline: The latest version of Open Office is a good choice, given all its enhancements.