OpenOffice.org 3

OpenOffice.org is a powerful productivity suite--including tools for word processing, spreadsheets, slideshows and more--with one major additional feature: it's free.

Whether OpenOffice 3--the first version to run natively on OS X and Intel-based Macs--is right for you essentially comes down to this decision: can you live without the latest features in Microsoft Office 2008? Most of the tools you need for productivity are here, minus an e-mail client. There's Writer, a powerful word processor; Calc for spreadsheets; Impress for slideshows; Draw for basic drawing and graphics; and Base to serve as--you guessed it--a database.

Major improvements
OpenOffice 3 is a major upgrade over the previous version, with plenty of new features, native OS support, and all the tools most people would need to get their work done. You begin in a splash screen called the Start Center, with new icons for the different applications you can select (you can't start the individual apps from the Applications folder). You can share data between apps, and run more than one module at the same time.

As a native OS X suite, OpenOffice 3 is extremely fast. The Writer application zips along without any of the annoying pauses and hiccups of the previous X11 Unix version (which you'll still need if you own a PowerPC-based Mac).

I tested OpenOffice 3 on a MacBook Pro Core 2 Duo 2.4GHz with 2GB of RAM; the application formatted a 200-page novel at lightning speed--like I was using TextEdit. Calc, the spreadsheet program, also ran fast. OpenOffice.org--which is a collaborative effort from developers who donate their time--does not post the minimum processing speed to run the apps; however, on a single-core 1.5GHz Intel Mac Mini with only 512MB of RAM, OpenOffice 3 was sluggish and crashed a few times. The suite requires at least 512MB of RAM and an Intel processor, with 400MB of space available on your hard drive.

If you don't need all the bells and whistles of Microsoft Office, check out OpenOffice.org 3, a free productivity suite that has many of Office's capabilities.

There's another major change in the latest version of the software: OpenOffice 3 supports the OpenDocument 2.1 (ODF) standard, a popular format that's used around the world, especially by government agencies. Speaking of format support: Writer supports Microsoft Word files, so you can open them and then save them in Word format or as ODF.

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