The differences between Calc and Excel are small, and for the most paJt come down to features being present in both, but set up in different ways. Styles, for example, work slightly differently in the Open Office programs compared with their Microsoft counterpalts. In Microsoft Office a single dialogue box allows you to select styles to use and to create new ones, but in Open Office this is a two-step process where styles must be set up before they can be applied.

Grouping of cells is also handled slightly differently, with Excel placing the button to expand and contract a group of cells in the cell below the group, while Calc places it above. This kind oflittle difference can be annoying at first if you're used to working in Excel, but we quickly adjusted to them. popular, but Microsoft's Powerpoint presentation software is so well known in the offices that any rival will have a tough job to compete. Stalt up Open Office's Impress presentation tool, though, and any concems that it might not be up to the job are quickly dispelled.

Impress looks and feels very much like Powerpoint, and the step-by-step approach to setting up each slide is comfortingly similar. Our complaint about the limited lllmlber of preset designs in Writer applies to a certain extent to the number of presentation styles included here, too, but many more can be found online.
With so many presentations created using Powerpoint it's vitally important for any presentation tool to be able to open its .ppt files.

In fact, Impress might well have been quickly consigned to the bin should it fail to open these files and display them correctly. FOitunately, it had no such problem: oW' test files opened perfectly, complete with all the styles,transitions and animations that we had created in Powerpoint. Presentations created in Impress itself can be saved as a PDF file that's easy to show off, print or email.