THIS FREE PRODUCTIVITY SUITE supports most Microsoft Office formats and comes close to matching its features. The Writer app feels like Word; Calc resembles Excel; and Impress is similar
to PowerPoint. Three additional apps round out the package. The first, Draw, a vector-graphics package, resembles the Office drawing tools. Base works with databases in its own XML format as well as in MySQL, dBASE, older Microsoft Access formats, and other standard formats. Math is a straightforward equation editor.

Converting Word files in OpenOffice.org worked well. Excel fared worse, and advanced PowerPoint animations and other effects didn't import, but the slides were still usable. Macros in Office files won't work, but the built-in automation language can per-form the same tasks as Visual Basic for Applications. The suite converts WordPerfect files remarkably well, and, unlike Office, exports directly to PDF. Ver¬sion 3.0, due in the spring or summer of2008, will have an e-mail and information manager, Web collaboration tools, wiki creation software, and compatibility with Office 2007 formats. It will also ship in an OS X version (the OpenOffice.org Mac page links to a test release).

OpenOffice.org isn't the friendliest or best-looking software, but, on the whole, it's massive¬ly powerful, generally reliable, and far cheaper than Microsoft Office