Thread: Interfaces of Open Office's

It's partly a tribute to how popular Word and Excel have become that the intelfaces 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 docLUnents in Writer without needing to dig through
the help files.



Feature for feature, Writer matches its Microsoft counterpart. Macros, chal1s, tables and images are all dealt withjust as capably, and even the Sh0l1cuts used to activate them are largely the same. Even the most complex Word documents containing cha11s and images can be opened and edited by Writer.

Writer isn't limited to mimicking Word, though, and in some areas it comfortably eclipses Microsoft's program. Open the File menu and you'll notice the Export as PDF option. This handy featme makes it easy to create a document that can be viewed and printed cOITectly 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 exect from a word processor.